The synthetic proposition: Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art 9781526119414

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The synthetic proposition Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art Nizan Shaked

The synthetic proposition

series editors 

Amelia G. Jones, Marsha Meskimmon Rethinking Art’s Histories aims to open out art history from its most basic structures by foregrounding work that challenges the conventional periodisation and geographical subfields of traditional art history, and addressing a wide range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present. These books will acknowledge the impact of recent scholarship on our understanding of the complex temporalities and cartographies that have emerged through centuries of worldwide trade, political colonisation and the diasporic movement of people and ideas across national and continental borders. Also available in the series Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960  Amy Bryzgel Art, museums and touch  Fiona Candlin The ‘do-it-yourself' artwork: Participation from fluxus to relational aesthetics  Anna Dezeuze (ed.) Fleshing out surfaces: Skin in French art and medicine, 1650–1850  Mechthild Fend The political aesthetics of the Armenian avant-garde: The journey of the ‘painterly real’, 1987–2004  Angela Harutyunyan The matter of miracles: Neapolitan baroque sanctity and architecture  Helen Hills The face of medicine: Visualising medical masculinities in late nineteenth-century Paris  Mary Hunter Glorious catastrophe: Jack Smith, performance and visual culture  Dominic Johnson Otherwise: Imagining queer feminist art histories  Amelia Jones and Erin Silver (eds) After the event: New perspectives in art history  Charles Merewether and John Potts (eds) Photography and documentary film in the making of modern Brazil  Luciana Martins Women, the arts and globalization: Eccentric experience  Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy Rowe (eds) Flesh cinema: The corporeal turn in American avant-garde film  Ara Osterweil After-affects|after-images: Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual Feminist museum  Griselda Pollock Vertiginous mirrors: The animation of the visual image and early modern travel  Rose Marie San Juan The paradox of body, building and motion in seventeenth-century England  Kimberley Skelton The newspaper clipping: A modern paper object  Anke Te Heesen, translated by Lori Lantz Screen/space: The projected image in contemporary art  Tamara Trodd (ed.) Art and human rights: Contemporary Asian contexts  Caroline Turner and Jen Webb Timed out: Art and the transnational Caribbean  Leon Wainwright Performative monuments: Performance, photography, and the rematerialisation of public art  Mechtild Widrich

The synthetic proposition Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art

Nizan Shaked

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Nizan Shaked 2017 The right of Nizan Shaked to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Publication of this book has been aided by a Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant of the College Art Association.

ISBN  978 1 7849 9275 0  hardback ISBN  978 1 7849 9276 7  paperback First published 2017 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or any third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

In memory of Dorit Shaked 1952–70

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction

page viii xi 1

1

Conceptual Art and identity politics: from the 1960s to the 1990s

27

2 3

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

60

The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

113

4

The political referent in debate: identity, difference, representation 156

5

Institutional gender: from Hans Haacke’s Systems Theory to Andrea Fraser’s feminist economies

194



A state of passionate detachment: Charles Gaines by way of conclusion

230

Bibliography Index

242 260

Figures

Installation view of the exhibition “Information.” 1970 page 14 Adrian Piper, Context #7, 1970. Title Page (book 1 of 7 black notebooks) 15 0.3 Adrian Piper, Context #7, 1970. “Three women & Peace sign” (book 6 of 7 black notebooks) 16 0.4 Adrian Piper, Context #7, 1970. “Guards” (book 6 of 7 black notebooks) 17 0.5 Adrian Piper, Context #7, 1970. “Gay is Good!” (book 2 of 7 black notebooks) 18 1.1 Joseph Kosuth, Titled (Art as Idea as Idea), [Self], 1967 33 1.2 Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: A-108 (Kant), 1975 35 1.3 David Hammons, Injustice Case, 1970 44 1.4 Pages 148–149 from “Information,” curator Kynaston McShine, The Museum of Modern Art, 1970 46 1.5 Renée Green, Import/Export Funk Office, 1992 47 1.6 Renée Green, Import/Export Funk Office, 1992. Lexicon, installation detail 48 1.7 Renée Green, Exhibition Invite for the Import/Export Funk Office, 1992 50 2.1 Adrian Piper, Concrete Infinity 6 inch Square [“This square should be read as a whole …”], 1968 62 2.2 Adrian Piper, Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece, 1970 63 2.3 Adrian Piper, Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece, 1970. Page 1 of 57 framed pages 64 2.4 Adrian Piper, Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece, 1970. Page 7 of 57 framed pages 65 2.5 Adrian Piper, Inflated Plastic Dropcloth Wall Piece, 1967 74 2.6 Adrian Piper, Inflated Plastic Dropcloth Floor Piece, 1967 74 2.7 Adrian Piper, Infinitely Divisible Floor Construction, 1968 75 2.8–2.9 Adrian Piper, Sixteen Permutations of a Planar Analysis of a Square, 1968 78–79

0.1 0.2

List of figures

Adrian Piper, A Conceptual Seriation Arrested at Four Points in Time, 1968 83 2.11 Adrian Piper, A Conceptual Seriation Arrested at Four Points in Time, 1968 84 2.12 Adrian Piper, A Conceptual Seriation Arrested at Four Points in Time, 1968 85 2.13 Adrian Piper, A Conceptual Seriation Arrested at Four Points in Time, 1968 86 2.14 Adrian Piper, Text of a Piece for Larry Weiner, 1969. Documentation notebook, page 1 89 2.15 Adrian Piper, Text of a Piece for Larry Weiner, 1969. Documentation notebook, page 4 90 2.16 Adrian Piper, Nineteen Concrete Space-Time-Infinity Pieces: Taped Lecture on Seriation (given November 7, 1968), 1968 92 3.1 Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Introduction, 1973 134 3.2 Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Introduction, 1973, detail, 1 of 4 units 25.5 × 20 cm each 135 3.3 Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation I, Analysed Faecal Stains and Feeding Charts, 1974, detail, 1 of 31 units 35.5 × 20 cm each 137 3.4–3.7 Mary Kelly, Studies for Post-Partum Document: Documentation I, Analysed Faecal Stains and Feeding Charts, 1974. 6 units 35.5 × 28 cm each 138–139 3.8 Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation V, Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index, 1977, detail, 3 of 36 units 18 × 13 cm each 140 3.9 Martha Rosler, Detail from The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, 1974/75 144 3.10 Martha Rosler, Tron (Amputee), in Goodbye to All That, Issue #3, 1970 146 3.11 Martha Rosler, Vacation Getaway, in Goodbye to All That, Issue #10, 1971 146 3.12 Silvia Kolbowski, an inadequate history of conceptual art, 1998–99, video still 149 4.1 Silvia Kolbowski, Model Pleasure I–VIII 1982–1983 (1982–83), detail, panel V 159 4.2 Silvia Kolbowski, Model Pleasure I–VIII 1982–1983 (1982–83), detail, panel III 159 4.3 Daniel Joseph Martinez, Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture) or Overture con Claque—Overture with Hired Audience Members, 1993 174 2.10

ix

x

List of figures

Daniel Joseph Martinez, Study for Museum Tags. Second Movement (Overture) or Overture con Claque— Overture with Hired Audience Members, installation view, 1993 4.5–4.6 Daniel Joseph Martinez, Studies for Museum Tags. Second Movement (Overture) or Overture con Claque— Overture with Hired Audience Members, installation view, 1993 4.7 Lorna Simpson, Hypothetical?, 1992, detail 4.8 Lorna Simpson, Hypothetical?, 1992, detail 5.1 Hans Haacke, MOMA-Poll, 1970 5.2 Andrea Fraser, Untitled, 2003 6.1 Charles Gaines, Manifestos, 2008 6.2 Charles Gaines, Manifestos: Black Panther, (1966), 2008 4.4

176

177 181 181 198 209 236 237

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material, and the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions.

Acknowledgements

This book took more than ten years to write, so I cannot thank all those who have contributed to my thinking and my psychological wellbeing—advance apologies for sticking to pragmatics and to those of you who were accidently omitted. My utmost gratitude goes to the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, administered by the College Art Association, for the generous support that allowed this book and its visual record to be so much more substantial. The research for this book has benefitted tremendously from a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Visiting Faculty Research Grant that sponsored my work at the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation in Berlin. I am immensely grateful to Adrian Piper for supporting my application and my work. I am also filled with gratitude to all the artists in this book for studio visits, discussions, images, and for making their art. California State University Long Beach has assisted with Block Assigned Time rewards, travel grants, and Research and Creative Activities grants. Moving from the MFA program at Otis College of Art and Design, to the short-lived but profound master’s program in Critical and Curatorial Studies at the University of California Los Angeles Department of Art (with my thesis mentored by and exhibited at the Fowler Museum), to the modular do-it-yourself Doctoral program in Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University, has given me a unique perspective not only on my subject matter, but on how academic disciplines work. My deepest thanks to my Ph.D. advisors: Frances Pohl for her patient guidance and comments on many drafts, her on-going support all these years, and for the solid ground of social art history; to Alexandra Juhas for interdisciplinary thinking and for involving me in her academic and praxis-based projects; and to Elazar Barkan for pressing empirical research and historical foundation. Juli Carson has been a professor and mentor at three different universities. Traces of “that Lacan seminar,” which took place in the shadow of the 2000 election, run through this book, just as they are detectable in several artworks that may yet survive history. Dedicated colleagues have read parts of the manuscript and offered

xii

Acknowledgements

instrumental comments: most notably Eli Pulsinelli, Barbara Preisig, Annetta Kapon, Megan Hoetger, Jeffrey Ryan, Nicholas Gaby, Andrea Fraser, Charles Gaines, Adrian Piper, and Mary Coyne. I also want to extend special thanks to Liz Kotz. Several colleagues have contributed to my perspective in this book in various ways: Gloria Sutton, Roopali Mukherjee, John Knight, Judie Bamber, Liat Yossifor, Sandeep Mukherjee, Andres Mario Zervigon, Jesse Lerner, John Tain, and, of course, the immeasurable and unparalleled Kimberli Meyer. I am hugely grateful to Emma Brennan at Manchester University Press for working with me on the Wyeth grant, and for being such a positive force throughout the writing and publication process, as well as to her staff for all their work. The series editors Marsha Meskimmon and Amelia Jones deserve special thanks for their rigorous comments and suggestions, as well as for pushing me to write a better book. Thanks are also due to the anonymous readers for their comments, and to my assistants turned colleagues Alyssa Schwendener, Crystal Miette Ferrer, and Amy Kaeser, for all the dedicated help. While I thank all of the above greatly, the shortcomings of this project are all mine. Several sections of this book were presented as conference papers and benefitted from the comments of participants and audience. I cannot list them all but the College Art Association conference, and the Historical Materialism annual conference in London are the two major forums where I was able to consistently workshop ideas. Thanks are also due to my colleagues at California State University Long Beach, School of Art, especially Christopher Miles, Karen Kleinfelder, Jay Kvapil, and Karen Warner, who supported this project directly and concretely. The editorial board of X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, of which I have been a member since 2008, has been an engaging and inspiring intellectual forum. In their gentle ways, Roy Dowell and Lari Pittman have been supportive at critical moments. The special collections staff at the Getty Research Institute offered invaluable help, as did librarians at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Fales Library and Special Collections New York University, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, special collections. Help with obtaining images was provided by Elise Lammer, Aude Pariset, Maria Colthrap, Noellie Roussel, Eve Schillo, Reiko Sunami Kopelson, David Martin, Dennis Reed, Lois Phlen, Dean MacGregor, Rita Gonzalez, Javier Anguera, Ray Barrie, Kelly Barrie, Audrey Moyer, Kayla Hagen and Barb Economon at the Walker Art Center, Juergen Dehm the Generali Foundation, and many more individuals at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hammer Museum at UCLA, and the galleries of the artists. Special thanks are also due to Mary Kelly, and to Martha Rosler and her studio assistants. My intense family Amalia and Yoseph Shaked, and Michal Barnea deserve thanks. I have no conscious memory of my sister Dorit Shaked, who died at

Acknowledgements

war, but her lingering presence through her writing, and in the void that filled all those around me with grief, has undoubtedly influenced my ideological break with the place from which I came. I dedicate this book to her memory in hopes for a better world. Finally, I thank Rafael, Refael, and Rafail Levi (or is it Levy) for, well—absolutely everything.

xiii

Introduction

Identity politics is irreconcilable with Marxism only if the former is understood to entail a world where communication and solidarity are possible only among those who share specific experiences. (Holly Lewis)1

The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art is concerned with two intersecting trajectories in American art between the late 1960s and the early twenty-first century. On the one hand, it traces the ways in which disciplinary Conceptual Art, with a capital “C”, expanded into the diverse set of practices that have been characterised generally as conceptualism. On the other hand, it shows how the expansion of a critical conceptualism has been strongly informed by the turbulent rights-based politics of the 1960s. Initially, first generation Conceptual artists responded to preceding art movements within disciplinary boundaries, examining the definition of art itself and engaging abstract concerns. Artists then applied the basic principles of Conceptual Art to address a range of social and political issues. My aim is to clarify major aspects in the advancement of conceptualism by showing the coherence of an on-going mode of practice that synthesised the infrastructural analysis of first generation Conceptual Art with a turn to overt representation of political subject matter. This development reflects the influence of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student movement, the anti-war movement, second wave feminism, and the gay liberation movement. Central in the American context, the multiple identity-based mobilisations that came to be known as “identity politics” were further articulated in the 1970s. These processes were reflected in various turns to identity politics in art, which were largely historicised independently from conceptualism. In contrast, I show a clear trajectory of practitioners, deeply influenced by Conceptual Art as well as by the political events of their time, who synthesised a disciplinary analysis of the definition and the context of art as a system of conventions with political subject matter, much of which revolved around a dialog with some form of identity-based politics. These practices became central in the 1990s with context-based, installation art, and other critical practices.2 Through a period

2

The synthetic proposition

bridging liberalism and neoliberalism—the latter characterised by privatisation, deregulation, financialisation, globalisation, and militarisation—artists developed modes of addressing political concerns, reflecting political changes in the forms and subject matter of their art.3 At the heart of this book is the work of artists who brought analytic concepts to bear on a critical understanding of identity, subjectivity, and the self as inextricably imbricated within social conditions and relations of production, language, visual systems of signification, the operation of cultural hierarchies, and the formulation of a political sense of being. These artists did not assume the existence of any inherent or essential identity, they instead established identity politics as a mode through which to consolidate political and aesthetic agency. The artists addressed in this book: Adrian Piper, Joseph Kosuth, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Andrea Fraser, Hans Haacke, and Charles Gaines, based their practices in Conceptual Art and expanded its propositions by way of critiquing both its claim to methodological objectivity and the limited scope of its original subject matter. Interested in a critique of political economy, philosophy, psychoanalysis, semiotics, institutional analysis, anthropology, and a range of developing approaches, they introduced a variety of strategies to reference political subject matter from broad interdisciplinary perspectives. Theirs was distinctly not an art that recorded or rendered events, nor was it simply art “about” politics. It was artwork that aimed to upset assumptions about forms, materials, conventions of representation, or the institutional framework of art, just as it examined the social function of identity formation and destabilised the notion of a coherent speaking subject. Thus the work was political not only because of its subject matter, but also because it performed self-analysis of its own means of reference, reflecting upon the implications of visual and physical manifestations of meaning. A central concept in this book is a reversal of the qualitative assessment made by artist and theorist Joseph Kosuth in 1969. One of the first practitioners to define Conceptual Art, his writings on the subject, even when contested, were of primary significance. His foundational distinction of art as either universal or particular was echoed in debates throughout the 1980s and 1990s about the legacies and strategies of political art. In the now canonical article “Art after Philosophy,” Kosuth contrasted Conceptual Art engaged in analytic propositions, which tautologically used art to define art, against synthetic proposition works that were contingent upon experiencing reality.4 The latter were considered by a Kantian philosophical tradition to be non-universalist and therefore inaccurate. The synthetic proposition—the turn to referencing worldly subject matter—was anathema to Kosuth and other Conceptual artists and champions. Kosuth, the milieu of Seth Siegelaub in New York, and the

Introduction

Art & Language group in the United Kingdom, who were in close contact with their New York cohort that later opened their own Art & Language branch, favored abstract approaches for being systematically applicable to the question of art’s meaning and purpose.5 They considered the experiences of subjects, particular historical events, or the description of political conditions as narrow or insular, inapplicable to basic analysis of political conditions. Kosuth declared in “Art after Philosophy” that art was the heir of philosophy and compared several ways in which art’s philosophical propositions can be formed. Referring to the recent “Specific Objects” (1965) by Donald Judd, which also identified that art was undergoing a major shift in attitude to production, Kosuth emphasised that advancements in art were no longer necessarily stylistic, contextualising them instead in relation to philosophy as advancements in human thought.6 Also important to his dictum of “art as idea, as idea,” were Ad Reinhardt’s “art as art,” and Sol Le Witt’s declaration that the “idea is the machine that makes the art.”7 Continuing the enquiry initiated in Marcel Duchamp’s activation of the readymade object as a work of art, Kosuth attempted in both his work and his writing to understand the function of art by withdrawing some of its defining characteristics, highlighting others, and overturning its previous assumptions. In general terms we can speak of a divide, a philosophical split between the abstract and the concrete, between methodologies aiming to address the universal rather than the particular (or in Kosuth’s terms, general versus specific).8 Whether explicit or implicit, this rift, which manifested in divergent methodological approaches to political theory and activism, existed in many other disciplines. In the United States especially, artists thinking through the critique of political economy and/or those addressing universalist foundational issues, made claims for their work on the side of abstract thinking and saw the Civil Rights based position as defining its subjects through anthropological or otherwise empirical experience, on the other side. Perhaps controversial, my distinction here does not consider Conceptual Art as entirely antithetical to the formalism that preceded it, finding a divide instead between abstract and referential approaches, an issue addressed throughout this book. Summarising several contemporaneous and subsequent challenges to the claims made on behalf of Conceptual Art as oppositional to the movements that preceded it, Frances Colpitt demonstrated several ways in which Conceptual Art followed from, rather than negated, formalism. “Paradoxically, the oppositional, anti-formalist strategies of Kosuth and Art & Language resulted in work with considerable formalist dimensions.”9 Lizzie Borden expressed this view as early as 1972.10 I, therefore, place emphasis not on the shift from formalist approaches to Minimalism and Conceptual Art, from the visual to idea-based art, but rather consider them both as favoring

3

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The synthetic proposition

abstraction and observe the change instead in the transition by artists to address specific issues. On the rise since the 1970s, the tendency to reference subject matter in some ways reversed almost a century of an avant-garde turn to abstraction. Abstraction was heralded as the highest accomplishment of modernist American art by such important figures as the critic Clement Greenberg and Museum of Modern Art director Alfred Barr, an ideology that, as I will discuss in Chapter 3, lingered overtly or covertly in movements of art and criticism that purported to negate formalism, yet still regarded abstraction to be a superior to the specific. It is important to underscore that American formalism is at its heart a Leftist perspective that saw abstract art as negating the commodity form.11 Addressing the tension between the “Old” and a “New” Left, Francis Frascina underscored: Many of the former emphasised, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the “achievements” of modernism within bourgeois culture as qualitative landmarks and signs of human liberation in contrast to capitalist “kitsch” and the barbarism of Fascism and Stalinist Socialist Realism. Two texts that exemplify such transformations in various ways are Meyer Schapiro, “The Liberating Quality of Avant-garde Art” (1957), and Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting” (1961).12

From the 1960s attitude became a more important category than medium, which was the primary term for Greenbergian modernism.13 The postmodernist shift, bracketing a period of transition on historical, political, and economic levels, can be observed in both conceptualism and identity politics, a further extension of what Kosuth defined as the transition in art: “from a question of morphology to a question of function.”14 Kosuth asserted that form is not the basic unit of art; rather artistic activity puts form to work. Media was no longer a given; for example, one was a sculptor because one intrinsically was, but rather through the choice of media which reflected artistic attitude. Thus, instead of observing the process of change from the modern to the postmodern by examining shifts in artistic approach to form, this book considers the media employed by the artists as a consequence of conceptualist choices. The centrality of media-specificity to American art criticism since the mid-twentieth century and the status of form as an abstract and therefore universal category, have been challenged by a new mode of particular politics that could function as a model, general in its application from one form of identity to another. Manifestations of these divergences appeared in artwork, exhibitions, publications, and other forums from the late 1960s, with debates peaking in the 1980s and the 1990s around identity politics, representation, or multiculturalism. By the end of the twentieth-century this rift appeared, for example, in the disagreement between disciplinary art history and cultural/visual studies.

Introduction

In their essay “Uneasy Bedfellows: Canonical Art Theory and the Politics of Identity” Derek Conrad Murray and Soraya Murray focus on the journal October and its editors as proponents of canonical art theory, and on identity politics as the subject of visual/cultural studies. “The tendency of key figures within October’s discourse toward a universalized interpretation of materiality— and their mobilization of that theorization—has contributed to a seminal discussion around formal qualities of the art object. Still, within the framework of our larger discussion, we question the formation of a binary relationship between formal concerns and the politics of identity”.15 The opposition between universalist concerns and practices that examined the construction of identity was indeed far less strict. Distributed more like a delta between two rivers, they have been in a process of synthesis since, at least, the 1970s. Periodising these debates, not in the 1980s or 1990s, but rather earlier, in the 1970s or even the 1960s, and locating them between typologies of political art, can eliminate much of the confusion that characterised the identity politics arguments of the 1980s and 1990s, and bring the dialog to a common ground. Many of the problems arising in contemporaneous and subsequent exchanges were because artists, curators, or historians brought such varying discourses to bear on the debates, and because shared terms were often used in paradigmatically different ways. Offering a parallel example, Holly Lewis described the different conceptions of terms as they play out in Marxist, feminist, or queer theory: Each of the frameworks above also takes a different object for its epistemology: the feminist meaning of “system” is patriarchy, while queer theory understands “systemicity” to be discursive structures willfully kept in place by those who benefit from the system. The object of Marxist epistemology, on the other hand, is the material organisation of society (Henning 2014). As a consequence of these different understandings of what is meant by the term system, Marxist, queer activists, and feminists (particularly second-wave feminists whose feminism is not wedded to queer politics) tend to talk past one another in their critiques of identity politics.16

“Multiculturalism” also suffered a similar fate. In its common and broad use by legislators and administrators it signaled the turn to encourage diversity and minority rights and was hence seen as positive progress towards inclusion and equality. But for many of the artists and scholars cited throughout this book, multiculturalism stood for state policy with all its shortcomings—a mere feel-good celebration of cultural customs and practices—a reflection of a broken system where multiculturalism was but a mask, a distraction from addressing the root causes of oppression or xenophobia as ground for exploitation. The communication breakdowns, as I will show in several case studies, took place when one party assumed how the other defined the terms. Different definitions

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The synthetic proposition

often stemmed from different periodisation parameters. Will Kymlicka outlined the misunderstandings surrounding multiculturalism, clarifying that: “the sort of multiculturalism that is said to have had a “rise and fall” is a more specific historic phenomenon, emerging first in the Western democracies in the late 1960s. This timing is important, for it helps us situate multiculturalism in relation to larger social transformations of the postwar era.”17 Kymlicka saw multiculturalism as part of the broader human rights project, which came in so-called waves: 1) the struggle for decolonization, concentrated in the period 1948–65; 2) the struggles against racial segregation and discrimination, initiated and exemplified by the African-American Civil rights movement from 1955 to 1965; and 3) the struggle for multiculturalism and minority rights, which emerged in the late 1960s.18

Institutional endorsement of multiculturalism in art, which moved from alternative frameworks in the 1980s to the center in the 1990s, was thus the consequence of a general shift in definition of democratic nationhood that began on the heels of World War II, foregrounded in the United States by the Civil Rights movement from the 1950s. Following the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, it was gradually implemented by the late 1970s as educational and economic policy. Between the administrative language of grant-writing and the various perspectives through which a range of art institutions, from alternative spaces to the mainstream, articulated their positions, multiculturalism could designate anything from formal state policy to artistic content. Understanding it as state policy dated to the 1960s will eliminate the endemic problem of discussing its effects. As much as possible, I aim to clarify a historical materialist perspective on how terms like identity politics or multiculturalism functioned in a social field and in relation to funding structures, clarifying how they were being used in the instances I cite. This book is thus an intellectual history of debates as they unfolded in artistic practice, writing, and exhibitions that took place in various scales and depths.19 I arrange a set of heterogeneous case studies in constellations, to show where ideas manifested, observe how they interacted, and trace how they developed over time. The model for arranging phenomena is based on Michel Foucault’s work in his Collège de France lectures (1970–81) where he traces genealogies of established disciplinary discourses and subjugated knowledges to understand how history was told (as opposed to simply “what happened”).20 The approach is a hybrid of several interpretations of the work of Karl Marx. Directly or indirectly it reflects the return to Marx of Louis Althusser (and his students) who synthesised Marx with Lacanian psychoanalysis towards a range of structuralist or poststructuralist antihumanist concepts of subjectivity. As Patrick McHugh explained:

Introduction

Foucault’s project retains distinct Althusserian resonances. First, Foucault appropriates Althusser’s structural reversal of anthropocentric humanism, and analyzes culture and society not as the product of sovereign human subjects, but rather conceives the subject as the product of impersonal social and cultural processes. Secondly, Foucault appropriates and extends Althusser’s distrust of the totalizing impulse in dialectical thought, and thus analyzes social and cultural processes by conceiving an autonomy for specific historical contexts or “conjunctures.” In these two fundamentally important aspects, then, Foucault’s project bears the influence of Althusser’s structural Marxism.21

Following this perspective, I consider identity not as a property of subjects, but through a set of relations which take place in a field, where subjects have a certain level of agency, but so does the undergirding socio-economic system, thus that the agency of subjects is influenced by how they are positioned within this matrix. All of the artists addressed in this book are theoreticians in their own right, have written extensively about their own work and, in general, about art. I consider the writing of these artists an important part of history and I use it selectively as record and evidence. In a few instances I use the words of artists to analyse their work, especially when their writing or further discussion is part of the work itself, as is the case with much conceptualist art. I also believe that artists know what they are doing, and for this reason approach the analysis of the work as a dialog with the artist. Additionally, there are many other artists that could have been considered in this book, such as Victor Burgin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Zoe Leonard, Simon Leung, or William Pope.L, but unfortunately space precludes further discussion. Why “identity politics”?

I use the term identity politics as a compound noun to refer to a historically specific political form as it developed from 1950s Civil Rights to the politics of difference, of representation, or identification by the 1990s.22 As a political mode that names a group through one or several shared characteristics, identity politics ran the gamut from the Civil Rights movement’s appeal for a place at the nation-state table to the radical communism of the Black Panther Party; from positive gay identity affirmation to anti-identity radical queer politics; permutations of which can be seen as antithetical or, dialectically, as having synthesised previous positions. Whether the political goal of the group is to establish identity or dissolve it, from the 1960s up to the present moment still, terms such as black, woman, etc. have been operative, and I use them as such. My interest is less in the subjective formation of identity and more in the collective economic and/or geographic conditions that pushed subjects to a unified identity understanding. Subjects forced into unity by communal

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The synthetic proposition

socio-economic circumstance, and sharing one or a set of characteristics defined by themselves or by others, consolidated their struggle around the terms of their oppression. I use the term identity to designate the shared characteristics and identity politics as the political action taken under that nomenclature. As the terms of oppression were used to name the struggle, they simultaneously marked the form of agency and the political potential—the stage from which to act. Thus, one’s personal sense of identity and identity politics are not one and the same, but are rather intertwined. In other words, one’s sense of identity and the fact that this identity is dictated by the parameters of a social order are mutually constitutive of one another but do not overlap. The first is of the psychological order, the latter of the thinking mind and acting subject. Furthermore, our self-understanding of how identities organise our lives has developed through time. Finally, that identity operates differently for subjects unified by different categories (race, sexuality, gender, or class) does not mean it cannot serve a universal or abstracted theory or practice. In Sexed Universals in Contemporary Art, Penny Florence developed a method to apply ideas of universality inclusively. By opening the discussion from the perspective of sex, but not limiting it as such, she argued for the application of universal concepts through multiple positions (but specifically not as a model). Florence referred to Monique Wittig’s groundbreaking lecture “The Straight Mind,” where Wittig famously declared that: “lesbians are not women,” and transformed the definition and uses of key concepts by showing that their universality was always founded on an unnamed particularity (specifically compulsive heterosexuality).23 Florence asked: How can the concept of the universal have a limit? Only by its misapplication to the specific without return to the universal from whence it came. If you begin at the universal in thinking about a phenomenon, but then stay with the specific manifestation of the universal in that phenomenon, you will cease to think about the universal […] The movement of abstraction is from the bottom up, if you like, rather than top-down.24

Examining the ways in which the appearance of universalism is produced, Florence showed instead how the idea of a sexed universal regenerates, rather than repeats, analytic discourse, also proposing its application to think race, class, or ability without relativity or hierarchy. Seen in this respect, precisely because it can cast such a broad net, the term identity politics can offer in general, and through art, a synthesis towards a large political front (and here I am deliberately avoiding the debate of whether this will happen through solidarity, coalition, or alliance, in order to circumvent the stalemate question of “for or against” identity politics). The attitude towards identity politics by many Left-leaning art historians reflects its criticism by the American and continental Left. In the United States,

Introduction

figures on the Left ranging from the editors of Dissent magazine (established in 1954), Irving Howe and Meyer Schapiro, to Paul Piccone of Telos (established in 1968), and scholars such as Todd Gitlin, David Harvey, and Adolph Reed Jr., criticised the conformist thrust of Civil Rights based strategies and regarded identity politics as an essentialist discourse, a Balkanising force, or as structurally complicit with the liberal nation-state apparatus.25 Representing an extreme end of the spectrum, Walter Benn Michaels stated that: After half a century of anti-racism and feminism, the US today is a less equal society than was the racist, sexist society of Jim Crow. Furthermore, virtually all the growth in inequality has taken place since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965—which means not only that the successes of the struggle against discrimination have failed to alleviate inequality, but that they have been compatible with a radical expansion of it. Indeed, they have helped to enable the increasing gulf between rich and poor.26

Less hasty to draw a relation of cause and effect, Wendy Brown has argued that since identity-based oppositional politics functioned within the terms of the liberal nation-state, they inadvertently reinforced the position of white male middle-class subjecthood as the ideal towards which minorities aspired: Without adjudicating the precise relationship between the breakup of class politics and the proliferation of other sites of political identification, I want to refigure this claim by suggesting that what we have come to call identity politics is partly dependent upon the demise of a critique of capitalism and of bourgeois cultural and economic values.27

The sense that identity politics was displacing a broader Leftist opposition drove much of the on-going critique against it. Yet, as Brown herself admits, the relation between the decline of the Left and the rise of identity politics was tenuous. Those arguing against identity politics were reading an effect, for which it was never the cause. The American Left suffered a blow by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Committee on Un-American Activities and was further demonised in the climate of the Cold War, not in the hands of identity politics.28 Nancy Fraser distinguished between the struggle for recognition of difference, and that of economic redistribution, but insisted that: Neither of those two stances is adequate, in my view. Both are too wholesale and un-nuanced. Instead of simply endorsing or rejecting all of identity politics simpliciter, we should see ourselves as presented with a new intellectual and practical task: that of developing a critical theory of recognition, one which identifies and defends only those versions of the cultural politics of difference that can be coherently combined with the social politics of equality.29

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The synthetic proposition

In art, the synthesis that had been forming since the late 1960s between identity politics and broader perspectives came to the fore in the 1990s. Amelia Jones defined the operation of identification over identity as a model, emphasising its malleability and the ways artists occupy its in-between spaces: The series of examples here point both to the fact that even 1970s identity-based work playing with structures of fetishism was often more complicated, and more intersectional, than has been acknowledged, and to the increasing complexity of projects that have addressed issues of identification under globalization since 1990 30

Identification indeed opens a possibility for the future and is the right term politically for coalitional action. However, I maintain identity politics both because it is the operative historical term and therefore the one with which to understand the past; and because this book looks at a definition of identity not only as a function of the subject who identifies but as a term of collective composition, which in many cases is established outside of subjectivity. Southern black identity, for example, might be determined by poverty and geographic proximity before it is established by identification. While these conditions are not necessarily what determines all identity formations, and most certainly reflect my world-view and not an absolute truth, it is inevitable that the socioeconomic conditions within which subjects find themselves form the vocabulary and surroundings of identification. At face value it may seem like my definition of identity may be incompatible with psychoanalytic definition, for, in a schema of identity that relies on the work of Jacques Lacan, identity is not self-identical, as psychoanalysis is epistemologically constituted on the notion that one cannot know one’s self directly.31 I indeed believe that this is the case, and in this respect I am using identity not in the sense of one’s self-identity, but rather as a discursive construct that has been imposed upon the subject from the universe of given language into which the subject is born and with which the subject is always already negotiating. For this purpose, identity is defined as the/a part of the self that overlaps with the subject, who is both the subject of the unconscious and the subject as subjected to the social order. Historically, the perceived rigidity of identity politics usually stemmed from the material conditions that consolidated subjects around a specific term (or even sets of terms). Even so, identity always already harbored the potential for broad-based politics. The influence of identity politics on Marxist analysis should therefore not be underestimated. Significant for the artist Mary Kelly, for example, was the work of Sheila Rowbotham, a Marxist feminist who, as early as 1970, identified that: The distortion in the Marxist tradition which tended to identify the material world only with the conditions of commodity production and the social relations which come directly from work on the cash-nexus, held back understanding of

Introduction

the interaction between commodity production and other aspects of life under capitalism. The family and school are the most obvious examples. Marxist theory has thus continually lagged behind the new forms of organization, that of women, of gays, and of students.32

Identity politics was not necessarily insular, with each agenda-group relegated to addressing only its identity variant, but rather forms of struggle became models for one another: “The power of the working class within capitalism and the growth of new kinds of political movements recently, particularly for black liberation, have touched the consciousness of women and brought many of us to question the domination of men over women.”33 This model is seen in the work of artists who brought analytic frameworks to bear on their understanding of identity, and vice versa. In their work identity functions as the site of agency, in the sense not only of the individual’s ability to act, but also of the ability to locate the nodes of structural overlap as sites for coalition building or solidarity potential. They render or respond to the imbrications of the subject as an entity that has been formed by the system, to a conscious agent that can act upon it, through constant negotiation. One common element shared by the artists I address, was the importance of textual and visual language, both of which were subjects of structuralist investigation. Eve Meltzer situated the predominance of the conceptualist concern with the aesthetic and political efficacy of language, in the structuralist shift. Structuralism, as Meltzer explained, marked the end of the humanist conception of the sovereign subject in command of his consciousness and history, replacing it with the: “notion that the human subject is a mere effect of preexisting systems.”34 Althusser, significant for many of the artists addressed in this book, formulated the subject as the individual interpolated by ideology—a person recognising their existence through terms set by the other (an official, governmental other).35 Meltzer’s analysis of Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–79) showed how Kelly elaborated upon Althusser’s invisible process of interpellation. Chapter 3 will discuss how Kelly made visible the process of her infant child’s “subjectivisation” between an economy of meaning and that of woman’s reproductive labor.36 As Juli Carson has shown, Kelly’s protagonists in her “story” were not individuals, but “types.”37 In this way, as Meltzer also demonstrated, a feminist work can offer a universal model: Post-Partum Document also seeks to reimagine the community or socius not by the attenuation of its constituents—as if we could be lifted up and out of the system as well as the body itself. In Post-Partum Document we are asked, through the noise of the symbolic, to see the “abstraction” that is the subject before subjection: the “non-sensical,” phenomenal excess left behind as he becomes a part of that very social order.38

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For the subject imagined by synthetic proposition art, identity was that aspect of the subject that interfaces with the world through systems of signification, and for which art was a locus of intervention, a prism between science and speculation. Artists such as Kelly engaged Conceptual Art by criticising its strategies, pointing to where it perpetuated the notion of artistic authority and presupposed art’s disciplinary autonomy. By the 1990s the revisionist challenges to conceptualism granted its place as an intellectual art practice. In contrast, the critics of identity politics echoed sentiments on the Left, where identity politics was faulted for the compatibility of its strategies with liberal state bureaucracy and seen as assuming an organic relationship between the subject and community. As a 1995 October call for responses demonstrates, identity politics was still perceived as essentialist:“although significant for feminist practices, the work of the 1960s and ’70s did generate theoretical critiques of its overt or underlying thematic of biological or physical essentialism.”39 Thus, while the critical debates about Conceptual Art served its further mystification, many practitioners and thinkers across the board cast identity politics as failing to address underlying economic conditions and class relations, and faulted it for being autobiographical or illustrative. This was in contrast to the fact that by the 1980s the feminist image-text interventions of artists such as Barbara Kruger or Jenny Holzer were very well received by scholars including Craig Owens, Douglas Crimp, or Hal Foster.40 However, while the significance of these artists’ contribution was fully articulated, it was positioned as pioneering rather than part of a longer continuum, and was rarely acknowledged as belonging to the broader thrust of identity politics’ influence. By the mid-1990s, the response to the 1993 Whitney Biennial, addressed in depth in Chapter 4, made evident that practitioners across the political and vocational spectrum of the art field, saw identity politics as lacking a capacity for abstraction and analysis of art’s forms. Yet, the return to overt politics in subject matter was not a new kind of narrative depiction or a simple return to social realism; rather it reconfigured the place and role of subject matter as a tool for intervention that undid the assumptions forming the enunciative field of artistic practice. In other words, the incorporation of the political referent in the artwork reshuffled the very vocabulary that defined artistic activity and allowed us to reclassify new types of gestures and visual vocabularies as art. New modes of referencing political questions were introduced not by picturing or portraying social conditions, but as entirely different ways to observe and convey the issues facing women, for example. As Mary Kelly already emphasised in 1979: “[w] hen synthetic propositions re-emerged they did so with an altogether different self-consciousness than before.”41 Synthetic propositions posed the political as a question of how images, and the ways in which they are rendered (or how objects are arranged), shape how we come to know the world.

Introduction

Models of synthesis

Although identity-based strategies originated in particular concerns, their influence spread far beyond the communities that formulated them. The impact of Civil Rights was exponential, the Black Panther Party (originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) directly influenced second-wave feminism and the gay rights movement, and during the AIDS crisis activists turned to feminist strategies. In the mid-1960s the image of the Black Panthers and their ideas were influential on many of the political and cultural movements around them and played an important role in the artistic imaginary. Party leader Huey P. Newton developed a model of thinking identity politics from a Marxist perspective whereby he applied an interpretation of dialectical materialism to observe how racism is mobilised to sustain relations of production, an oppression that serves capitalist exploitation.42 Newton called for “revolutionary inter-communalism”—the formation of alliances between minority groups, specifically referring to the gay and women’s movements as early as 1970. The Panthers were an influential reference point for several artists at the time, and since; their Ten Point Program (1966), co-authored by Newton with Bobby Seale, inspired the platform of the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), a group of artists and critics who came together to fight for artists’ rights in museums and then moved on to protest the Vietnam War and minority exclusion in the arts.43 In the catalogue for the watershed exhibition “Information” (1970) at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, which included the work of several AWC members that will be addressed throughout this book, curator Kynaston McShine juxtaposed journalistic photographs of the Panthers with Marcel Duchamp’s proto-idea-art.44 Having abandoned painting in favor of making meaning by working with found objects, Duchamp’s strategies became the bedrock of conceptualism. Although the Black Panther Party was not taken as a context in the writing of conceptualism’s history, as a model and a referent it has persisted through the synthesis of positions in both artmaking and art writing, key instances of which I trace throughout this book. The synthesis is seen in Adrian Piper’s contribution to “Information” titled Context #7 (1970) where Piper solicited visitor feedback by inviting the audience to write or draw into seven notebooks; in this way, she left for posterity a sample archive of contemporaneous sentiment (Figures: 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5). Looking through the notebooks today, one finds as many proclamations and comments about politics as one does reactions to the newly emerging art forms that took visitors by surprise in a show full not of painting or sculpture, but rather diagrams, photography, words, surveys, and other new modes that manipulated “information” as a means to generate artistic form. Working within the Conceptual paradigm, Piper

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0.1 

Installation view of the exhibition “Information.” The Museum of Modern Art, New York. July 2, 1970 through September 20, 1970. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Detail: Adrian Piper, Context #7, 1970. 7 black notebooks, ink, graphite, crayon, postage stamps, photograph, sugar package on paper. 11.75 × 11 × 3 in. each (29.84 × 27 × .9.4 cm each). Collection of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA (www.walkerart.org). T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2008 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

was concerned with the problem of artistic authorship and subjectivity, the commodity status of the art object, and its presumed opticality, facilitating instead an activity that resulted in a work of art. By opening the work to public response, the political concerns of the moment appear through the preoccupations of the participants, many of which reflected the aesthetics of the exhibition. Audience input consistently took the direction of mapping subject-positions in socio-economic coordinates, relating the blankness of the page in reference to the canvas as a space for artistic expression, and many forms of meta-discussion both of the work itself and contemporaneous politics. For example, one entry reads: Artists who are truly concerned w/ merging art + life in a meaningful way should refrain from participating in official exhibits. Rather they Should unify to occupy oppressive art institutions + return them to the People. W/out life there is no art. W/out people there is no life.45

Adrian Piper, Context #7, 1970. 7 black notebooks, ink, graphite, crayon, postage stamps, photograph, sugar package on paper: Title Page, found in book 1, first page. 11.75 × 11 × 3 in. each (29.8 × 27 × 9.4 cm each). Collection of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA (www.walkerart.org). T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2008 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

0.2 

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0.3 

Adrian Piper, Context #7, 1970. 7 black notebooks, ink, graphite, crayon, postage stamps, photograph, sugar package on paper: “Three women & Peace sign,” found in book 6, in the last third on the back side of the page. 11.75 × 11 × 3 in. each (29.8 × 27.9 × 9.4 cm each). Collection of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA (www.walkerart.org). T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2008 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

Another audience member responded immediately underneath: “So why did you participate?? By your presence here you helped to define the exhibit.”46 The notebooks reveal the degree of viewer awareness of the political dimension of Piper’s gesture. Discussed further in Chapter 3, Context #7 reflects Piper’s move from addressing the mythological role of the artist in artistic production to mapping the position of the artist as subject to the social order of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and class.

Introduction

17

Adrian Piper, Context #7, 1970. 7 black notebooks, ink, graphite, crayon, postage stamps, photograph, sugar package on paper: “Guards,” found in book 6, approx. midway through, on the front side of the page. 11.75 × 11 × 3 in. each (29.8 × 27.9  × 9.4 cm each). Collection of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA (www.walkerart. org). T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2008 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

0.4 

If Conceptual Art was art about art, then synthetic conceptualism became art about political art (not simply art about politics). Isolating agency from subjectivity, these artists examined the subject’s relation to the identity-based collective and society as a whole.47 There is no neat chronology that can explain the historical process that has brought us to the present, but the significance of both conceptualism and identity politics to contemporary art is undisputed. This book is therefore not structured as a narrative sequence

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0.5 

Adrian Piper, Context #7, 1970. 7 black notebooks, ink, graphite, crayon, postage stamps, photograph, sugar package on paper: “Gay is Good!,” found in book 2, last third of the book, on the front side of the page. 11.75 × 11 × 3 in. each (29.8 × 27.9  × 9.4 cm each). Collection of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA (www.walkerart. org). T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2008 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

of events, but rather as a set of heterogeneous studies that bring to light how an analytic art practice has evolved into a synthetic one that incorporated the politics of the world around it, and how art questioned its own means of forming reference. Fredric Jameson has noted that: “all isolated or discrete cultural analysis always involves a buried or repressed theory of historical periodisation.”48 I locate the shift that conceptualism has undergone from the modern to the contemporary between the bookends of the late 1960s and the early 1990s. The relevance of the 1960s (as a period and a symbol of uprisings) to the early 1990s has flared up again with the Occupy Wall Street

Introduction

movement in 2011 and the Black Lives Matter movement in 2012, reflecting the questions and possibilities of identity-based issues on the national and international stage, for which American identity politics is a historical model. The first chapter “Conceptual Art and identity politics,” overviews the 1960s–70s shift from disciplinary-based Conceptual Art to an interdisciplinary conceptualism, crediting the influence of contemporaneous politics dominated by identity and issue-based politics. I draw a distinction between how terms such as identity or multiculturalism were employed bureaucratically and how artists examined them from a critical perspective. While administrative mechanisms often regarded identities as stable categories, there is abundant evidence that activists and artists clearly understood the inherently split nature of subjectivity and that this critical outlook had already commenced in the late 1960s. Looking at Adrian Piper, David Hammons, and Renée Green, artists who had worked with the synthesis of politics and conceptualist strategies since the late 1960s, I observe how radical identity politics manifested in art that performed both an analysis of its own forms and of political discourse. Chapter 2, “Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism,” offers a survey of Piper’s early work, from her minimalist experiments in 1967, through her analytic conceptual investigations in the period between 1968 and 1970, into her transition to a synthetic mode of working with explicit political reference. Special emphasis is placed on the exchange of Conceptual Art with concrete poetry, a prolific format for Piper, who participated in several projects facilitated by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer around the publication 0 to 9 (1967–69). Thinking visually about words and regarding the page as artistic surface, these poets forged relations with artists just as the latter were developing an interest in words as material. Part of the circuit of artists revolving around the series of “Language” shows (1967–70) at the Dwan gallery (initially organised by Robert Smithson), Piper was included in two of them. Her work performed semiotic analysis through the tension it set up between the appearance of language and its meaning, playing on collapsing and reassembling the distinction between visual and textual signification. Since Piper’s recognition surged in the late 1980s, there has been a tendency to emphasise her identity work or enter the work with an emphasis on her subject position. However, her early work forms a necessary base from which to appreciate the full implications of her later work, as well as the significance of her visible influence on other artists. This chapter proposes an alternative to the way in which her identity work has been read, demonstrating that her early preoccupation with enquiries into the universal nature of time and space and her analyses of artmaking models were in fact firmly grounded in the Conceptual aim to eliminate subjectivity from the process of artmaking, and introduced a means to isolate the self

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and the subject as an ontological question. Her engagement of social and political issues followed from this logic. In her works of the early 1970s, Piper treated the self not as a subject but rather as an element within the artwork. When she introduced the body and employed it as an object, her subsequent autobiographical tone represented not her interiority but rather her activating identity as a model in order to observe such processes as the formation of political consciousness. In accordance with this chronology, I argue that we should consistently read the meaning of her 1980s work not as subjective expression but rather as conceptualism that examined the body of the artist as art object through categorial analysis. In her performances Piper drew clear distinctions among the self, identity, and subjectivity, putting them to work as items to be assembled, interchanged, and examined. Her work structurally distanced subjectivity from a political concept of identity, and made it distinct from definitions of minority “experience.”49 Experience was used as a model by which to extrapolate how race and gender are “read” in the social sphere. Her strategy was in many ways equivalent to the manner in which Robert Rauschenberg used brush strokes not as an authentic expression of his inner being, but rather as signifiers. As if placed in quotation marks, Rauschenberg’s brush strokes were signs among all the other items he brought into his assemblages, not expressive themselves but signs forming a commentary about the ethos of expressionism. This attitude to practice was paradigmatic for many 1960s and 1970s artists who explored the self as part of a semiotic system of meaning, and not as a direct expression of being. Here, I use the literary theories of Roland Barthes, who articulated the manifold relations between cultural manifestations and their reference of social and political realities, in order to examine the function of second order signifying systems in conceptualist work. Chapter 3, “The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art,” asks how Conceptual Art is political art, analysing several works by synthetic proposition artists in relation to the debates about the location of the political. It summarises key claims of early Conceptual artists in New York and Art & Language in the United Kingdom, placing them within a historiographical account of the movement’s main debates. Defining the synthetic proposition, its philosophical origins, and relationship to the Duchampian legacy, I trace the intersection of ideas that stemmed from Immanuel Kant’s late eighteenthcentury aesthetic philosophy. Both Greenberg and Kosuth used Kant’s ideas in ways that, despite distinct ideological and philosophical contradictions, also sustained affinities and continuity. The development of art under the mode of the synthetic proposition expanded artistic practice towards an interdisciplinary direction, in accord with the changes that arts and the humanities underwent in the 1970s, especially the introduction of semiotic analysis in film and literary theory that elaborated

Introduction

upon Ferdinand de Saussure’s and Charles Sanders Peirce’s definitions of the sign. New means to address political concerns proliferated in the work of artists who analysed the function of visual and textual tropes. This chapter chronicles how Conceptual Art’s interlocutors elaborated upon its original claims. Focusing on Adrian Piper, Lucy Lippard, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, and Silvia Kolbowski I map a broader field of feminist interventions into conceptualism (which included many more artists such as Eleanor Antin, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, or Martha Wilson, who, unfortunately, space precludes from discussing), unpacking the various representational structures through which political subject matter appeared in the work, marking the distinction between the “signified” and the “referent.” Chapter 4, “The political referent in debate: identity, difference, representation” surveys several key 1980s events and exhibitions before taking in depth the 1993 Whitney Biennial—the “identity politics biennial”—as its central case study for understanding the debates of the 1980s and the 1990s. It also assesses the literature that has developed around this landmark exhibition and summarises the debates around identity, multiculturalism, representation, and power; it identifies how the discourse of the exhibition comes to be defined, and observes the relations between the institutional framework, the curatorial agenda, and what the art itself performed. Exemplary of the synthesis of feminism and institutional critique, and paradigmatic of 1990s context art, Andrea Fraser’s contribution to this exhibition, which was based on her interviews with the curatorial team, reveals the institution as a complex entity that is both systematic (administrative) and subjective. I revisit the controversial contribution of Daniel Joseph Martinez, arguing that it is not a subjective work, as almost of all of its critics assumed, and look at how the reference to the 1992 Los Angeles riots in Lorna Simpson’s work was activated as a synthetic proposition. Chapter 5, “Institutional gender: from Hans Haacke’s System’s Theory to Andrea Fraser’s feminist economies” argues for the relevance of institutional critique not as a proper name for an art movement that was, but rather as a type of on-going practice with renewed relevance and thrust. Examining the ways in which Haacke’s work referenced political subject matter, simultaneously changing the conception of the processes and roles of artmaking and art, I argue against critics who regarded his work to be “about” politics. I then analyse a set of works where Fraser criticised the role of art institutions including the museum, the gallery, and the market, and trace the ways in which her practice reflected a synthesis of economic analysis and feminist perspectives. Fraser’s work serves to highlight the inherent contradictions between the claims and the practices of institutions. I show how those contributions have been greatly exacerbated by the monetisation and financialisation of art by banks and auction houses since the 1980s when they became joint

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enterprises to lend money against art and developed credit and mortgaging tools to cultivate a new global class of art collectors. The financialisation of art, the ability to leverage it as a financial tool, can be seen as another symptom of capitalists seeking speculative opportunities, and is arguably one of the main causes of the current market bubble. Synthesising institutional critique with identity politics, Fraser’s work points to the coordinates where the most intimate aspects of the self relate to a market economy. I argue that her transition from a service-based model of practice to the making of objects not only is consistent with her work in institutional critique, but also strategically targets the value-form of art as distinct from that of the commodity. The Conclusion looks at the transition in the work of Charles Gaines from purely systems-based conceptualism to a new mode of referencing the political in a non-descriptive manner. In many ways, the arc of his practice echoes the shift from the analytic to the synthetic. In it, we can see how the synthetic is not a descriptive mode. Setting up algorithmic systems to translate meaning from the visual, to the textual, to the musical and back, Gaines’s poetic translation of narrative into form reflected upon the biases inherent to certain semiotic tropes. The case studies are deliberately heterogeneous, arranged in an order that allows for entry points, on several scales, into the development of the intersection of conceptualism and identity politics. Chapter 1 gives an overview and sets the terms of the debate. Chapter 2 delves into Adrian Piper’s early period situating her early oeuvre in the context of the debates of the period and their historiography, as well as in relation to the conceptual analytic mode. Her work also appears in Chapter 3, both to show the development of her oeuvre towards the synthetic, and to observe the development of other feminist practices, all of which are foundational for the artists and exhibitions of the 1980s and 1990s discussed in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 looks at the arc from the 1970s to early in the twenty-first century through the work of two institutional critique artists, both of whom combined, in different ways, aspects of analytic and systems analysis conceptualism. The Conclusion observes a development in the work of a single artist to show the consistency of referencing political subject matter with its systematic origins— how the political referent, once introduced, was non-iconic in image and function. The book traced the flow of positions over a period roughly spanning forty years. It asks where artists locate politics within art, rather than how art can intervene into politics. In a longer view I see these concerns as extending the Frankfurt School debates of the 1930s that questioned how art is informed by politics—forever relevant as the world and the forms of art remain in constant flux.

Introduction

Notes 1 Holly Lewis, The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection (London: Zed Books, 2016), 18. 2 For key examples see Peter Weibel, Kontext Kunst: Kunst der 90er Jahre (Köln: Du Mont Verlag, 1994); and Jennifer A. González, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 3 Financialisation is the growth of financial markets over that of industry and production that characterises the period from, roughly, 1980 and which is still on-going. David Harvey summarises neoliberalism as a trend towards economic deregulation that, combined with austerity measures, shapes a world–order geared to benefit wealth. See A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), a contested term I am using here to designate an intensification of the capitalistic system. For summary of select attitudes to neoliberalism see: Jason Read, “A Genealogy of Homo–Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity,” Foucault Studies no. 6 (February 2009): 25–36. 4 Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy,” Studio International 178, no. 915 (October 1969): 136. 5 For a comparison between the two branches of Art & Language see Alexander Alberro, “One Year under the Mast: Alexander Alberro on The Fox,” Artforum (Summer 2003): 162–164, 206. The position of Art & Language UK is discussed further in Chapters 2 and 3. 6 Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965), 74–82. 7 Ad Reinhardt’s “Art as Art,” Art International 6, no. 10 (December 1962), and Sol LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 79–83. 8 Joseph Kosuth, “Notes on Specific and General,” in Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966–1990, ed. Gabriele Guercio (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 12. Kosuth’s unpublished notes were written in 1968. 9 Frances Colpitt, “The Formalist Connection and Originary Myths of Conceptual Art,” in Conceptual Art; Theory, Myth and Practice, ed. Michael Corris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 33. Another view and for some distinctions between Russian, British, American formalism, Victor Burgin, “Socialist Formalism,” Studio International 191, no. 980 (1976): 148–152. 10 Lizzie Borden, “Three Modes of Conceptual Art,” Artforum 10 (June 1972): 68–71. 11 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6, no.5 (1939): 34–49. 12 Francis Frascina, “Angry Arts, the Art Workers’ Coalition and the Politics of ‘Otherness,’ ” in Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000): 109. Meyer Schapiro, “The Liberating Quality of Avant-garde Art,” Art News 56, no.4 (1957): 36–42. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting (1961),” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85–93. 13 The articulation of art’s development as that of attitude was defined by the exhibition Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (Works—Concepts— Processes—Situations—Information), curated by Harald Szeemann for the Kunsthalle Bern and The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1969.

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14 Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy,” 135. I am using “postmodern” to designate the period that followed modernist art, which began, roughly, in the 1960s, and was characterised by the changing attitude to artmaking that will be described throughout this book. 15 Derek Conrad Murray and Soraya Murray, “Uneasy Bedfellows: Canonical Art Theory and the Politics of Identity,” Art Journal 65, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 31. 16 Lewis, The Politics of Everybody, 19. Lewis is citing Christoph Henning, Philosophy After Marx: 100 Years of Misreading and the Normative Turn in Political Philosophy, trans. Max Henninger (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 17 Will Kymlicka, Multiculturalism: Success, Failure, and the Future (Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute, 2012), 5. 18 Kymlicka, Multiculturalism: Success, Failure, and the Future, 6. 19 My influences here are: Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972); The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966), trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1994); and more specifically their application in art by Mary Kelly, “Reviewing Modernist Criticism,” Screen 22, no. 3 (Autumn 1981): 41–62; and Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). 20 As Foucault explains: “Archeology is the method specific to the analysis of local discursivities, and genealogy is the tactic which, once it has described these local discursivities, brings into play the desubjegated knowledges that have been released from them.” Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 1997), 10–11. 21 Patrick McHugh, “Dialectics, Subjectivity and Foucault’s Ethos of Modernity,” Boundary 216, no. 2/3 (Winter/Spring 1989): 96. 22 Although many favor the term “the politics of identity,” I use “identity politics” for its economy of prose. For the philosophical definition and implications of identity politics see Cressida Heyes, “Identity Politics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2012), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ spr2012/entries/identity-politics/. Also see James Clifford, “Taking Identity Politics Seriously: The Contradictory, Stony Ground …” in Without Guarantees: Essays in Honor of Stuart Hall, eds. Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie (London: Verso Press, 2000), 94–112. 23 Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” reprinted in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson et al. (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 51–57. 24 Penny Florence, “On Universals, Myth and Morphogenesis,” in Sexed Universals in Contemporary Art (New York: Allworth Press, 2004), 30, 31. I thank Marsha Meskimmon for introducing me to this excellent work. 25 Todd Gitlin, “From Universality to Difference: Notes on the Fragmentation of the Idea of the Left,” Contention 2 (1993): 15–40. 26 Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Diversity,” New Left Review 52 (July/August 2008): 33. 27 Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments: Late Modern Oppositional Political Formations,” in The Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (New York: Routledge,

Introduction

1995), 206. Also see Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 28 Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987) (New York: Bantam, 1993). Gitlin was generally against identity politics; however, the above cited book does recognise the many contributions of Black Power to the developments of the American New Left. 29 Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Postsocialist’ Age,” New Left Review 212 (July/August 1995): 69. 30 Amelia Jones, “Fetishizing the Gaze and the Anamorphic Perversion: ‘The Other is You’,” in Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (New York: Routledge, 2012), 88. 31 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973), trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1994). Special thanks to Itai Farhi for underscoring this point at the Historical Materialism conference, London (2013). 32 Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1973), xv. 33 Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, 120. 34 Eve Meltzer, “Antepartum,” in Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013), 9. 35 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–186. 36 In various ways, and using variations on the term, theorists like Jacques Rancière, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler have addressed the ways in which subjects are both subjugated and formed by the systems in which we live. A good selection of papers is offered in The Identity in Question, ed. Rajchman. 37 Juli Carson, “Post-Partum Document: An Introduction,” in Mary Kelly: Projects, 1973–2010–, ed. Dominique Heyse-Moore (Manchester: The Whitworth Art Gallery, 2010), 74–79. 38 Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved, 200. 39 Silvia Kolbowski and Mignon Nixon eds., “Feminist IssueS: A Special Issue,” October 71 (Summer 1996): 5. 40 Although belatedly acknowledged, the influence of feminism was credited in the 1980s. Craig Owens was one of the first critics to admit his initial omission of feminism’s foundational role in the postmodernist turn. See Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: New Press, 1998), 65–92. However, despite the influence Civil Rights and Black Power had on U.S. feminism, it was being historically considered as independent of these contexts. See Hal Foster, “Subversive Signs,” in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985), 99–118. 41 Terence Maloon, “Mary Kelly Interviewed by Terence Maloon,” Artscribe 13 (August 1978): 18. 42 Toni Morrison, ed., To Die for the People: The Writing of Huey P. Newton (1972) (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009).

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43 Huey P. Newton, “The Ten Point Program,” in To Die for the People, 3–6. See Lucy Lippard, “Art Workers’ Coalition: Not a History,” in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (New York: E. P. Dutton Inc., 1984), 10–19. The extent of the Panthers’ influence is also apparent in the multiple entries collected in Art Workers’ Coalition, Open Hearing and Documents (1969), www.primaryinformation.org/ index.php?/projects/art–workers–coalition/. 44 Kynaston McShine, “Essay,” in Information, ed. Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 138––141. 45 Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation, notebook facsimile copy. 46 Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation. 47 Most certainly by the 1980s these notions were widely recognised. See Benedict R.O. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983) (London: Verso, 2002). 48 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 3. 49 Joan W. Scott, “Experience,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 22–40.

Conceptual Art and identity politics: from the 1960s to the 1990s

When we have revolutionary conferences, rallies, and demonstrations, there should be full participation of the gay liberation movement and the women’s liberation movement. Some groups might be more revolutionary than others. We should not use the actions of a few to say that they are all reactionary or counter-revolutionary, because they are not. (Huey P. Newton (1970))1 In the eighties, none of my students knew what Conceptualism was. I believe, along the lines of Hal Foster’s theorization, that sometimes the return of certain kinds of aesthetic production can have more impact than their original presentations. It’s obvious with Duchamp that this was the case. But although I was calling for the return of Conceptualism, in a way, I wasn’t presenting this inadequate history in order to point to the pathos of something that had had its day and passed. I was trying to use the failures of memory to point to the problems of some theorizations and discourses around the return. (Silvia Kolbowski (2001))2

An approach that foregrounds ideas over the visual appearance of art, conceptualism is now understood as having multiple points of derivation and encompassing varying artistic attitudes. This chapter asks how a precisely articulated set of practices, defined by artists in the 1960s as Conceptual Art, evolved into a broad notion of conceptualism, and how the latter had expanded into its present forms. I use the proper name “Conceptual Art” to refer to the New York movement of the 1960s and its European affiliates, or the United Kingdom based Art & Language group, while “conceptualism” designates a more diverse set of tendencies, or when referring to both.3 Within this expanding chronicle characteristic trajectories have gradually been defined from broader methodological and geographical perspectives.4 This chapter shows how, in the United States’ context, some of the most important strategies of conceptualism developed through the influence of contemporaneous politics, more specifically the transition from Civil Rights into Black Power, the New Left, the anti-war movement, feminism, and gay liberation, as well as what later came to be

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collectively named “identity politics” in the 1970s. Almost all critics and historians have, throughout this period, considered conceptualism and art concerned with identity as two separate developments, and not as they in fact occurred— intertwined and deeply related. Practitioners and historians of conceptualism defined it as a debate with the formalist approaches that preceded it. In contrast, they considered identity politics as a return to a reliance on artistic subjectivity, narrative or figurative strategies, and essentialist definitions of selfhood, and therefore harboring reactionary modernist attitudes. Indeed, there was a paradox to identity politics, because to approach the political question through identity was to self-define using the very terms that constituted oppression and how it was transmitted in language and culture.5 However, a range of artists that can be defined, or who have self-defined, as conceptualists, incorporated the lessons of rights movements in a critical capacity, synthesising Conceptual analytic approaches with an outlook on identity formation as a means of political agency, and not as a representation of the self, a strategy that significantly expanded in the 1970s. In other words, one of the biggest influences on the development of Conceptual Art into conceptualism was identity politics. Identity as model

Two major aspects of identity politics have impacted the field of art. The first, activist and administrative, consisted of protests against existing institutions, the development of action groups and collectives, and the subsequent formulation of alternative spaces. Both public protest and shifts in artistic practice propelled practitioners in the field to agitate for institutional change and affected attitudes towards practice. By the late 1960s conceptualism and rights movements overlapped in protesting the institutional framework of art, with manifold opinions, attitudes, ideologies, and agendas exchanged through a proliferation of collective activities reflecting both friction and mutual influences. One of the first events, organised in 1968 by a group of African-American artists and critics, was a protest at the Whitney Museum’s failure to include black artists in their exhibition The 1930s: Painting and Sculpture in America.6 Soon thereafter, in January of 1969, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) was formed by some of the same protestors in dissent of the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America 1900–1968. Rather than exhibiting actual artworks of artists living and working a few blocks away, the display at the Met featured images and projections about African-American culture.7 The BECC aimed to address the widespread exclusions practiced by this flagship art institution and demanded control of self-representation and inclusion through employment and exhibition opportunities. At approximately the same time the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) was formed around the demand of artists to control the exhibition of their own

Conceptual Art and identity politics

work.8 Soon thereafter they expanded their focus and their ranks to address a wide set of political concerns, most notably the Vietnam War and the racist discrimination exercised by museums. From the diverse perspectives expressed at the AWC public forums, the two major approaches to political art can be generalised.9 The first is by Conceptual artists who regarded their intervention into the definition of art as the political act. The second is by those who saw politics as subject matter to be communicated through images or narrative. Those who favoured pictorial or conceptual abstraction saw the return of subject matter in art as necessarily reactionary, and not as the attack on what were foundationally hierarchical structures. Yet, a new attitude was emerging that synthesised the two approaches, where artists committed to an analytic focus positioned their political intervention as an enquiry into the vocabulary of art. They made visible how meaning itself was already an outcome of a world ordered by economic relations, class, race, gender, and sexuality, focusing the attention of the viewer onto the question of how those meanings get established, formed in language, and distributed by visual vocabularies. They introduced the political referent as a systematic question advanced through an analytic model. The second aspect of identity politics was the bearing that it had on artistic strategy, form, and subject matter. The latter can be generally split into two discernible approaches: one that took a critical outlook on identity formation, and another that relied on it, representing the artist as a subject of identity or difference. I focus on the former, acknowledging the important contribution of strategic identity or community-based approaches whose influence has changed forms, minds, and policies; they belong to the wide field of oppositional art practices.10 Within the many approaches that fall under this umbrella term, there existed a mode of cross-identity politics influenced not by subjective identity, but by the principles of a critical minority perspective.11 This critical identity politics took identity as a rubric, one that could be inhabited by a number of subject positions, and through which commonality of struggle could be articulated. Thus, while identity-based politics stemmed from situated knowledge, the various ways in which their influence spread complicated the distinction between a universal conception of the political subject and the particular aspect of the question of rights. Étienne Balibar has since argued that, unless it remains utterly theoretical, the concept of universality can only function through paradoxical co-existence of the particular as universal, since universal ideas eventually come to be materialised in life, inevitably “lowering” them to specific examples, while a concept of a universal subject remains forever abstract and idealised.12 Modeled after Civil Rights, various permutations of identity politics in the United States were rooted in the socioeconomic circumstances of their respective formations and have defined their modes of political action accordingly. Moving on the axis between universalist approaches and their concrete implementations, in reality, a clear separation of the two has proved

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impossible to define beyond utterly theoretical paradigms. Instead Civil Rights became one model of political action, and so did its potential to radicalise. I look specifically at those instances that I find apply from one typology of identity politics into another, defining, for example, both Civil Rights and The Black Panther Party, in relation to identity politics, instead of rendering the former as a reformist model versus the latter as a revolutionary one. The political rhetoric of both has been directly influential on the field of art. Organised in 1991 by art historian Michele Wallace, the ground-breaking symposium “Black Popular Culture” offered an interdisciplinary comparison of questions surrounding “black nationalism, essentialism and Pan-Africanism.”13 In her presentation “Black Nationalism: the Sixties and the Nineties” Angela Davis recalled the development of her political position from identity politics to communism, showing how ideas morphed, how complex and contradictory essentialist discourses of empowerment could, on the one hand, be reified, but on the other, open up possibilities for inter-group alliances. Davis cited the Black Panther Party newsletter of 1970, where Huey P. Newton wrote a letter “urging an end to verbal gay bashing, urging an examination of Black male sexuality, and calling for an alliance with the developing gay liberation movement.”14 Newton was inspired by Jean Genet, who was smuggled into the United States in 1970 by the Panthers, to speak in support of freeing their jailed members.15 Responding to tense interactions with the Panthers around his gay identity, Genet arrived one evening dressed in pink lamé. Genet’s statement propelled his hosts to recognise his marginalisation, a story they later relayed to Newton, who was jailed at the time. In her talk Davis emphasised that as flawed and incomplete as these abolitionist projects were, they were nevertheless significant historical models, persistently suppressed in the process of historicising the 1960s. The Panther’s identity-based revolutionary model had since the mid-1960s influenced other minority groups. Its principles developed from an early form of Black Nationalism to a model relying on dialectical materialism.16 Newton identified that racial oppression was a means to sustain class stratification and a disposable reserve of cheap labor, policed through endemic and murderous racism. He led the Panthers to implement concrete solutions such as exercising the right to bear arms in self-defence and establishing free breakfast and healthcare programs, supported by donations from local businesses, since they owed it to the communities that consumed their goods and services. In his writing Newton devised a mode of alliance-based resistance he named “revolutionary inter-communalism.” Lecturing at Yale in February 1971, Newton explained the Party’s attitude: We saw that it is not only beneficial for us to be revolutionary nationalists but to express our solidarity with those friends who suffered many of the same

Conceptual Art and identity politics

kinds of pressures we suffered. Therefore we changed our self-definitions. We said that we are not only revolutionary nationalists—that is, nationalists who want revolutionary changes in everything, including the economic system the oppressor inflicts upon us—but we are also individuals deeply concerned with the other people of the world and their desires for revolution. In order to show this solidarity we decided to call ourselves internationalists.17

The significance of this strategy lay not only in its synthesis of identity politics with analysis of capitalist exploitation, but also in Newton’s total integration of class and race politics as a model for fighting intersecting forms of oppression and exploitation. He synthesised identitarian definitions of community with anti-capitalist analysis, retaining enough principles of the universal to draw analogies between various particularities and, thus, form a basis for solidarity. In many ways the identity model of the Panther Party, one rooted in a/the materialist analysis of socio-economic and political circumstance of subjects and communities, defined the approach to the politics of identity by synthetic proposition artists. A closer look reveals a set of practices that since the late 1960s tackled political issues at this junction of form and content, where the universal base, or abstract concern, was applied through situated or content based subject matter. Conceptual Art: from analytic to synthetic

The first wave of 1960s Conceptual artists demarcated their positions mostly in relation to previous artistic paradigms, negating modernist reliance on artistic gesture and composition articulated by Clement Greenberg in the legacy of the European tradition as self-critical painting. The rediscovery of Marcel Duchamp’s iconoclastic strategies in the 1950s and the 1960s by artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Morris led Conceptual artists to articulate art as a mode of criticism wielded against the dominance of the visual paradigm in art. They questioned the disposition of the artist as creative genius, the reliance of artistic meaning on the interpretation of critics and specialists, the passive role of the viewer, the specificity of media, or the singularity of the art object in service of its luxury-commodity status. Up until the late 1960s Conceptual Art can be variously characterised in art historical terms as reviving the Duchampian readymade, responding to or extending the concerns of Fluxus and minimalism, dematerialising the object, echoing the information age, or commencing the linguistic turn in art, to name a few key perspectives. Criticising the expressive strategies and the economy of the art object in the movements that predated them, Conceptual artists’ intervention remained within the boundaries of the discipline. By the late 1960s, however, an atmosphere of political urgency directly impacted artistic approaches towards broader subject

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matter and methods or strategies derived from other disciplines in the arts, the humanities and social science. It can be said that this transition from the analytic to the synthetic is one of the key trajectories in the development of Conceptual Art into conceptualism. Joseph Kosuth first distinguished between the “synthetic proposition” and the “analytic proposition” in his canonical text “Art after Philosophy.” Citing the philosopher A.J. Ayer on Immanuel Kant’s distinction of philosophical propositions, Kosuth asserted: “a work of art is a kind of proposition presented within the context of art as a comment on art.”18 He approached art as a philosophical tool meant to define the task of artistic practice within its own parameters. Kosuth favored the analytic proposition, which focused on abstract and universal concerns. By contrast, the synthetic proposition, which relies on experience of the world that is outside of the realm of art (or philosophy), was seen as open to error.19 In his series First Investigations (subtitled Art as Idea as Idea) (1966–69), Kosuth displayed photostats of enlarged dictionary definitions of words such as “idea,”“abstract,” or “definition,” emphasising enquiry into meaning over visual or morphological concerns (Figure 1.1).20 He also used the term “self,” which, together with the series, will be addressed further in Chapter 3. Kosuth’s method did not eliminate the aesthetic aspect of the work, its presence as an object of sensual perception or existence within a visual vocabulary subject to judgement in terms of taste, but rather, in its attempt to appear neutral it exhibited what Benjamin Buchloh named the “aesthetics of administration,” a term that over and above all others has come to dominate the discussion of this movement.21 Just as cerebral intent could not be free of aesthetic choices, so the analytic aspect of the work always anticipated an eventual political manifestation. An exemplary shift from analytic to synthetic can be seen in the early oeuvre of Adrian Piper, a participant in the founding generation of Conceptual Art in New York. Her work developed from a preoccupation with art’s condition, engaging questions of space and time from 1967–70, into a complex investigation of the idea and nature of “self ” in her examinations of the distinctions and overlaps between such general categories as the self, identity, or subjectivity since the early 1970s. The consistency between Piper’s early self-referential work and her subsequent synthetic approach is clear. For example, Untitled (“The time needed to read a line …”) (1968) formed a line across the middle of an otherwise empty page, by typing the mirror image of the title’s words in one horizontal band. The work was part of the series later titled Nineteen Concrete Space-Time-Infinity Pieces (1968–69) that used type on standard letter-size paper (eight and a half by eleven inches) to display forms and ideas—words that appeared visually and reflect upon their meaning, discussing their own condition of being (Figures: 2.14–2.16). In

Conceptual Art and identity politics

Joseph Kosuth, Titled (Art as Idea as Idea), [Self], 1967. Photostat on vinyl, mounted on masonite with documentation, 48 × 48 × ¼ in. (121.9 × 121.9 × 0.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, Promised gift of Emily Fisher Landau P.2010.165. © 2016 Joseph Kosuth / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

another work from the series, a line appeared through the consecutive repetition of the word “monotonous,” making the process of physically reading perform the very same thing described by the text. The work directed the viewer/ reader to pause and think about the ability of the mind to perceive the entirety of the line without in fact reading it word for word, proposing a moment of reflection about the mind’s propensity towards gestalt. By extension, one could ask about the automated ways in which the human mind obtains meaning. Referring directly or indirectly to the viewer/reader or speaking about the process of reading, respective works in the series tautologically pointed to the activity of the viewer/reader, slowing the reading down by using multi-syllable words, typing the information backwards, using punctuation in wrong locations, eliminating spaces between words, or interchanging capital and lower-case letters in unconventional locations, all the while explaining to the reader what is being done. The series tested as many as ten different ways of rendering forms and/or meaning out of words. Consistent with the goal of Conceptual Art, defined by Kosuth as tautologically referring to its own definition, the work called attention to the difference

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between looking and reading, or between the text as a visual phenomenon and the text as a vehicle that communicates content. As opposed to the modernist artwork, however, where the ability of the work to self-reflect indicated the autonomy of the work of art, this self-conscious work emphasised that meaning was a function of reception. Significance or sense was not an autonomous message communicated by the artist but was rather meant to come into fruition when received by the audience, filtered by those communication vehicles that gave it form, in this case, language through paper and type. In the early 1970s Piper gradually began to introduce her body as part of the equation. The investigation continued in the later works where she drew distinctions between her sense of self, her body as an art object, and her role in the process as both subject and object. In an on-going series of clandestine performances (discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2), she positioned herself as both artist and viewer, in order to distinguish between the self as self-identical and the self as other, posing the question as a philosophical one, not one of personal identity.22 It was only with Piper’s well-known series The Mythic Being (1973–75), where she masqueraded as a character of a third world male, that issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality were addressed as subject matter (Figure 1.2).23 Appearing first as gallery-section ads in the Village Voice and then as staged or manipulated photographs or photo-text pieces, the work was distinctly not about her self, but was rather a continuation of the attempts to split the identity of the work’s author from a personal sense of self, just as the work continued to probe questions about the condition of the artwork, its reception, and circulation. The analytic Conceptual core in Piper’s later synthetic work rendered the identity markers of race, class, and gender not as particular traits that describe an individual, but rather as a set of characteristics that reveal the systematic function of marginalisation by showing how they are both the cause and effect of oppression. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, artists continued to elaborate upon conceptualist devices by bringing feminism to bear on the criticism of art institutions, by using critical race discourses and postcolonial analysis to question the ideology of knowledge and method, and by rethinking avant-garde strategies for both art and activism during the AIDS crisis. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the synthetic proposition was debated in various guises in colloquies about identity politics and multiculturalism that raised issues of the universal versus the particular, or in conversations that examined the site of the political in art.24 In the latter, discussed in depth in chapters 3 and 4, we see a tendency to locate the political either in form or in content, despite the fact that with advanced semiotic analysis artists have been challenging the form versus content distinction since the late 1960s.

Conceptual Art and identity politics

Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: A-108 (Kant), 1975. Six altered photo reproductions of the original oil-crayon drawing on black and white vintage photographs, 1 of 6. 27¼ × 18 in. (69.2 × 45.7 cm). Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. © APRA Foundation Berlin.

Rights movements, intersectionality, and multiculturalism: identity politics in historical and cultural context

Following the surge of Civil Rights activism in the 1950s, rights movements of the 1960s fought for subjects to gain the full benefits of citizenship, equal access to resources, and protection under the law. In the 1970s a multiplicity of smaller interest groups expanded the focus on policies and legislation into every realm of familial, social, and cultural life—concerns centered on identity politics. Much contemporary usage of the term reflects its definition by the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist group that formed in the mid-1970s to examine the unique interconnected conditions affecting the subjects of

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identity-based discriminations, as they are enacted, sustained, or exacerbated by socio-economic oppression: The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives […] This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics.25

The term identity politics described the historical reality of a divided and segregated United States, where the economic conditions of minorities left no other choice but to protest within the confines allowed by the democratic state. In this respect, the criticism, addressed in the Introduction, that identity politics is not revolutionary, becomes a moot point. Without making any historical claims, I also point out that it wasn’t until Jim Crow laws were overthrown and legal rights were secured (theoretically) in the mid-1960s with the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) that revolutionary forms of resistance such as Black Power became discursively and pragmatically possible. To follow Angela Davis, this should be seen as a continuum, not as an opposition. Moreover, despite the stark differences between the goals and strategies of Civil Rights and Black Power, both movements relied on identity as an agent to unite an activist community from a collective already consolidated by race and geography. Conditions of unemployment for African Americans in the inner cities systematically deprived them of the power to withdraw their labor as a form of protest, leaving identity to be the most immediate common denominator for organisation or mobilisation. As Chris Chen argued, race was not peripheral to the struggle between capital and labor, or to social divisions in the United States: The formal abolition of slavery has subsequently come to define the American achievement of what Marx called “double freedom”: the “freedom” of forcible separation from the means of production, and the “freedom” to sell labourpower to the collective class of owners of those means … “Race” has been reconfigured in response to this world-historical anti-racist upsurge, and continues to exist as a body of ideas—but also as a relation of domination inside and outside the wage relation—reproduced through superficially nonracial institutions and policies. Two dynamics have reproduced “race” in the US since the mid-twentieth-century anti-racist movements: first, economic subordination through racialised wage differentials and superfluisation, and second, the racialising violence and global reach of the penal and national security state.26

Conceptual Art and identity politics

Chen rejects the dismissals of identity politics as an epiphenomenon of class. Indeed, a convincing analysis of a cause and effect relation between identity politics and the persistence of oppression and exploitation within the structure of the liberal nation-state is still absent from the body of the Leftist critique of identity. In other words, that the rise of identity politics and the retreat of the welfare state or the fragmentation of the Left was coincidental is not enough of an argument to discredit the potential of identity-based politics to advance broader social justice, or the potential to negotiate a broadly based oppositional front. Moreover, as Sharon Smith showed, intersectional identity politics was rooted in radical struggles, as much as it was in feminist ones: The Combahee River Collective, for example, was made up of women who were veterans of the Black Panther Party and other antiracist organizations. In this political context, Black feminists established a tradition that rejects prioritizing women’s oppression over racism, and vice versa. This tradition assumes the connection between racism and poverty in capitalist society, thereby rejecting middle-class strategies for women’s liberation that disregard the centrality of class in poor and working-class women’s lives.27

Yet, neither identity politics nor intersectionality could, according to Smith, replace Marxist analysis, as their focus was on oppression, and not on exploitation. However, as Newton identified, oppression and exploitation were coexistent, one affording the other. Intersectionality is a black feminist perspective developed to address the specific exclusions subjects face when their discrimination cannot be recognised by the legal system because there is no precedent or a definition of their status.28 What became a broad-based methodology was developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw from knowledge situated in specific legal cases where the meeting of two types of discrimination left black women vulnerable to double discrimination—one based on both gender and class—that positioned their particular identity typology at a greater socio-economic disadvantage than either black men or white women separately. These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated. Thus, for feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse to embrace the experiences and concerns of Black women, the entire framework that has been used as a basis for translating “woman’s experience” or “the Black experience” into concrete policy demands must be rethought and recast.29

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The “experience” here is neither subjective nor personal, but economic and statistical; the consequences are experienced by subjects, but the cause is external, affected by the law. Intersectional feminists derived a theory of difference through the application of policies in real life, which was then applied more broadly to the discussion of multiple cultural phenomena. Critics subsequently warned that intersectionality reinforced gender and race positions, producing subjects as others, while establishing white feminism as a point of reference, thus sustaining marginalisation. Offering the notion of “queer assemblage,” not as oppositional, but rather “frictional,” Jasbir Puar situated the term in relation to a shifting world-order: Further questions arise when the viability of intersectionality as a theoretical frame is re-situated within a changed historical and economic landscape of neo-liberal capitalism and identity. What does an intersectional critique look like—or more to the point, what does it do—in an age of neo-liberal pluralism, absorption and accommodation of difference, of all kinds of differences? If it is the case that intersectionality has been “mainstreamed” in the last two decades—a way to manage difference that colludes with dominant forms of liberal multiculturalism—is the qualitative force of the interpellation of “difference itself ” altered or uncertain? Let me qualify that my concern is not about the formative, generative, and necessary intervention of Crenshaw’s work, but of both the changed geopolitics of reception as well as a tendency towards reification in the deployment of intersectionality.30

What Puar eventually offered is a way to use intersectionality without an investment in the subject (inevitably the subject of “otherness”) but as a set of relations.31 The point is that extrapolation did not make the method itself irrelevant but, rather, demands a scrutiny of how it is applied. The resurgence of an identity politics-based movement with Black Lives Matter in 2012, reinforces Puar’s perspective that: To render intersectionality as an archaic relic of identity politics then partakes in the fantasy of never-ending inclusion of capacity-endowed bodies, bypassing entirely the possibility that for some bodies—we can call them statistical outliers, or those consigned to premature death, or those once formerly considered useless bodies or bodies of excess—discipline and punish may well still be the a primary mode of power apparatus.32

It is because not all bodies exist equally under the law that we still need identity politics. Here, we can distinguish the relevance of identity politics to on-going struggles today, and identify the ways in which it has been applied in the past, delineating the difference between its political use to fight oppression (and consequently exploitation), and how it influenced artistic practice and, separately, the cultural sphere. Theorising the commonality

Conceptual Art and identity politics

between Marxism and theories of difference Abigail Bakan explained the terms: Exploitation refers to social relations that develop and are reproduced in the process of the economic extraction of surplus. Alienation refers to the general distancing of human beings from what makes them in fact human. Oppression can be seen to operate in two distinct ways, as class oppression and as special oppression. Oppression is variable and contingent; it is, however, necessary to the reproduction of the social relations of capitalism.33

When examining the history of art it is important to consider that art practices centered on representing minority identity and culture were in many cases the ones adopted by museums during the forty-year transformation of institutional policies in the wake of Civil Rights. The representation of identities in museums was part of a bureaucratic apparatus that ultimately defined quite narrow concepts of identity or community identification.34 Coco Fusco described a system that had first excluded minority representation and later developed the concept of multiculturalism—for some a celebration of diversity, for others an objectification of difference: From the perspective of those who have been geographically, politically, culturally, and economically marginalized in and by the United States, these celebrations and the curiosity that drives them are not necessarily disinterested or inherently progressive phenomena. They are, instead, potentially double-edged swords, signaling both the exercising of control over cultural difference through the presentation of static models of “diversity” and the potential opportunity to transform the stereotypes that emerge with the imposition of control.35

Tailored to suit institutional language reliant on key words and impatient with nuance, administrative and program choices made by museums and private funding agencies often perpetuated rigid definitions of identity or multi-cultural belonging. Artists and scholars perceived these formations to be compatible with the liberal and neo-liberal capitalistic nation-state, and a part of its oppressive apparatus, as Slavoj Žižek identified: Of course, the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people—as “natives” whose mores are to be carefully studied and “respected.”36

But a phenomenon like multiculturalism should not be examined through its effects. Chon Noriega contextualised the transition from rights-based movements to cultural nationalism and identity politics in the shift from public to private funding: If civil-rights legislation resulted in universal rights and suffrage, the state played an equal role in expanding the public sphere to incorporate racial and

39

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The synthetic proposition

sexual minorities now granted the rights to full citizenship. But it did so in a calculated way that maintained class and racial stratification: in effect, white middle-class artists went to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA); minority and working-class artists went to the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). When these distinctions broke down in the early 1980s, largely due to the dismantling of CETA and similar programs, the culture wars began.37

Noriega identified two major stages impacted by economic and ideological forces. First, he argued, the move toward inclusion sustained class and ethnic hierarchies through the division of governmental funding agencies. Then, in the advent of the 1974 economic recession, when support for the arts dramatically declined, minorities were left with no choice but to seek private funding: “a market-based approach to social issues emerged in the late 1970s and has been official state policy since the 1980s.”38 When seeking support from private organisations (the Ford Foundation being a major example), practices demonstrating a clearly defined minority perspective were also more likely to receive funding than more complex approaches. Minority programs since the 1960s were generally subject to fluctuations of policy.39 Noriega’s description suggested that the opposition to multiculturalism in the arts and academy could be understood in part as a turf war over resources. In “Slippages,” an essay written in 1997, the artist Renée Green also made the connection between the 1990s disciplinary debates that took place between canonical art history and cultural/visual studies to the economics of globalisation and ensuing structural changes in universities: “questions of how money was being allotted to departments arose, and a mini territorial struggle seemed to be underway.”40 Criticising Hal Foster’s notion of the artist as ethnographer, Green offered instead genealogical methods and ways to think about cross-cultural encounters as “contact zones.” In a 1994 conference and a 2003 publication Green developed Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the colonial contact zone to consider the residues these encounters have left in the cultures and the (postcolonial) spaces we inhabit. In her artwork, to which I will return later, Green framed the layered manifestations of contact zones as they appear in objects, and printed and recorded matter as evidence of events, rather than portraying events narratively.41 A critical engagement with identity was for Green also a typology of the contact zone. “What John Rajchman said about identity as a topic also applies to ways in which to perceive of the ‘contact zone,’ not solely as a political problem but also as a problem for thinking and for creating.”42 The significance of this synthetic approach was that it advanced identity as a problematic, something to work on or with, not “for or against.”

Conceptual Art and identity politics

Against the assumption that as a Marxist his position should be averse to multiculturalism, Žižek dialectically opened up a possibility: Paradoxically, today’s true conservatives are rather the leftist “critical theorists” who reject liberal multiculturalism as well as fundamentalist populism, those who clearly perceive the complicity between global capitalism and ethnic fundamentalism. They point towards the third domain, which belongs neither to global market-society, nor to the new forms of ethnic fundamentalism: the domain of the political, the public space of civil society, of active responsible citizenship—the fight for human rights, ecology and so forth … Even when the change is not substantial but a mere semblance of a new beginning, the very fact that a situation is perceived by the majority of the population as a “new beginning” opens up the space for important ideological and political rearticulations—as we have already seen, the fundamental lesson of the dialectic of ideology is that appearances do matter.43

Žižek seems to have nodded towards the work of Stuart Hall and the emphasis placed by Cultural Studies on the politics of representation.44 Since multiculturalism was a corrective measure meant to compensate minorities for hundreds of years of exclusion and misrepresentation, it had both positive and negative implications. Cultural and political positions were formulated within a set of external constraints that were already setting the terms of the discourse before exhibitions and artworks even appeared on stage. Strategic artistic devices were often overlooked because of assumptions made on behalf of minority artists. It is evident how the history of identity politics and multiculturalism was in fact a consequence of framing, how context was already generating meaning for the reception of artistic gestures, which should have been understood on their own terms. Legacies of the 1960s: whose“60s”?

Debates in the 1990s about the strategies of Civil Rights based activism and identity politics stemmed from varying perspectives on the 1960s. In his article “ ‘1968’: Periodizing Politics and Identity,” Kobena Mercer discussed the erasure of existing 1960s identity politics’ political achievements by the majority of works that attempted to historicise the era’s revolutionary moment on its twentieth anniversary. Emphasising an argument put forth by Michele Wallace, Mercer explained: In my view, what is at stake in contemporary representations of 1968 is not just the question of who is excluded and who is included in the story, but the way in which organic connections between the New Left and the new social actors are subject to a process of selective erasure and active forgetting.45

41

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Mercer distinguished identity politics from celebratory affirmation. Perceiving identities to be neither regressive nor progressive in function, but rather significations open to appropriation on either side of the political spectrum, he focused on the analogies, alliances, and inter-connections between various articulations of liberation, themselves based on very different modes of identification such as the influence of Gandhi’s nonviolent strategies on Civil Rights in the United States and nuclear disarmament in the United Kingdom, or how both the Women’s Movement and the Gay Liberation Movement drew their platforms from the Black Panthers. Also interpreting the 1960s were participants of an October special issue in 1994, subsequently published as The Duchamp Effect (1996). October editors and their guests examined the reception and interpretation of the Duchampian legacy by the neo-avant-garde. Benjamin Buchloh, who wrote the introduction for the editors, summarised the project as intending to get past the false opposition between traditional humanistic models and misunderstood Duchampian paradigms, or as a way out of what he defined as the stalemate debates between poststructuralist orthodoxy and a social art history.46 It was also declaratively a means to determine which of the artistic models that returned in the 1990s were still relevant for the recent resurgence of political art. The Duchamp Effect project as a whole remains significant for its debate concerning Conceptual Art’s origins and for approaching history as a set of returns. However, it still exhibited the same systematic oversight described by Angela Davis and Mercer, reflected in Hal Foster’s conclusion to his taxonomy of the exponential influence of Duchamp’s watershed strategy of recontextualising readymade objects as art: Such elaboration is a collective labor that now cuts across entire generations of neo-avant-garde artists—to develop paradigms like the readymade from an object that purports to be transgressive in its very facticity (as in its first neo repetition), to a device that addresses the seriality of objects and images in advanced capitalism (as in Minimalist and Pop art), to a proposition that explores the linguistic dimension of the work of art (as in Conceptual art), to a marker of physical presence (as in site-specific art of the 1970s), to a form of critical mimicry of various discourses (as in allegorical art of the 1980s), and, finally, to a probe of sexual, ethnic, and social differences today (as in the work of such diverse artists as Sherrie Levine, David Hammons, and Robert Gober).47

I have no objection, except to the historical error Foster makes when he classifies David Hammons—a major artist working since the late 1960s—as an artist of the 1990s. Neither Hammons nor his interventions commence in the 1990s. This periodising mistake sites the preoccupation with “sexual, ethnic, and social differences” in the 1990s when they clearly date to the late 1960s, as does the synthesis of overt political content and Duchampian devices, evident in

Conceptual Art and identity politics

Hammons’s practice throughout his career, but specifically in his body prints that commenced in the late 1960s, such as Boy with Flag (1968). Hammons arrived in Los Angeles in 1963—the year Walter Hopps curated the first Marcel Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum.48 Like his Los Angeles peer group, which expounded upon the semiotics of assemblage and incorporated the influences of Duchamp, Hammons activated several levels of visual tropes to refer to reality through mimetic and associative signification, echoing Jasper Johns’s revival of the Duchampian body cast. In With my Tongue in my Cheek (1959), for example, Duchamp attached a plaster relief of his cheek, with his tongue pushing against it from inside, to a drawing of his profile. Translating a linguistic pun into a visual and physical object, Duchamp made a figure of speech literal. If the work illustrates the idea of a speaker whose words tell one thing while meaning another, it simultaneously turns on itself, when the negative, the relief, reveals that with his tongue in his cheek the subject cannot speak.49 Also unable to speak was Hammons’s subject in Injustice Case (1970), Black Panther Bobby Seale (Figure 1.3). Charged in 1968 with intent to incite a riot outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the judge responded to Seale’s vocal protest in court by ordering him gagged and tied to a chair.50 Hammons activated allegorical and indexical signification, telling the story through narrative tropes, while allowing the materials to disturb the coherence of the image. The oppression of Seale was framed by Hammons using a symbol of the state apparatus, the American flag, representing systematic racism, not democracy. The materiality of the flag’s weighty stitching appears as physical as the enforcement and legal system is for the oppressed subjects within it. In contrast, the image of Seale kicking and bucking his bondage is flat and ephemeral. Hammons printed the image by dipping his body and objects in margarine, then pressing them onto the surface, finally sprinkling the work with pigment to create a ghostly translucent image, startling in its life-like qualities. The contact print, made by one object touching another, was indexical in its essence. The margarine oil gave the paper film-like qualities making it resemble a negative in its appearance.51 Photographic negatives and prints are chemically fixed to stop their development processes and to last, and Hammons’s body prints have a photographic quality, suggesting a trapping of subject in a racist identity. In many ways they bring to mind Frantz Fanon’s analysis in “The Fact of Blackness,” where he described the psychological violence inflicted upon his sense of being when his existence was rendered and then thrust at him by a racist other: The movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye … And already I am being

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1.3 

David Hammons, Injustice Case, 1970. Body print (margarine and powdered pigments) and American Flag. Sheet: 63 × 40½ in. (160 × 102.9 cm). Framed 69 × 47 × 2¼ in. (175.2 × 120 × 5.7 cm). Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum Acquisition Fund (M.71.7). Photo © Museum Associates / LACMA.

dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed. Having adjusted their microtomes, they objectively cut away pieces of my reality. I am laid bare.52

Fanon showed how a racialised subject comes to be rendered by the gaze of white culture, how vision and its representation have consequences in reality—a broader sense of the gaze that functions beyond the interpersonal, a mode that organises space, language, and the visual order. Hammons’s positive/ negative image points to the means by which vision is transmitted: the indexical print, the material object, and their relation, fragmenting the signifiers to operate as a set of relations, rather than mere positive/negative reversal, where

Conceptual Art and identity politics

one is rendered by its relation to another. Between the presence of the flag and the ephemerality of its image, the work can be seen as playing on the tension between culturally constructed representation and its material consequent effects in the lives of people. Within the range of “the Duchamp effect” umbrella, Hammons synthesised how appearance functions within the system of meaning and/or the system of the law, a semiotic approach to interrogate how race is perceived or “read.” This preoccupation may have been a returning concern in the 1990s, but it was not born then. To understand the 1960s and their on-going interpretations by artists since, we must take into account the contribution of identity politics. As Laura Cottingham underscored: The rupture with modernism and the subsequent American art practices which have come to be termed postmodern have a direct relationship to the activist struggles which erupted in the U.S. during the 60s and early 70s; to deny this historical specificity is to greatly misunderstand contemporary American art.53

The Duchamp Effect discussion took place within the boundaries of the October archive (“archive” used here in its Foucaultian sense)—that is, subject to the ways in which the editors, together and separately, organised knowledge.54 They had not yet recognised that the 1960s already saw a significant synthesis between Duchampian strategies and political activism, for example in the work of Adrian Piper, still, at that point, omitted from the discussion.55 The convergence of identity politics and the influence of Duchamp was already presented at the significant Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition “Information,” which in the summer of 1970 summarised the artistic trends of the 1960s. Reflecting the climate of rebellion, it defined “information art” and idea-based art in their relation to the sense of political and artistic crisis. Although it displayed a diversity of attitudes to practice in post-minimal, earthworks, and other emerging approaches, and, of course, the core group of self-defined Conceptual artists including Kosuth, Christine Kozlov, Robert Barry, Mel Bochner, Douglas Huebler, Piper, Lawrence Weiner, Art & Language Press, and several of its individual associates the exhibition’s internal coherence crystallised major tendencies that can be generalised using conceptualism as an umbrella term.56 Curator Kynaston McShine explained in the catalogue that: The activity of these artists is to think of concepts that are broader and more cerebral than the expected “product” of the studio. With the sense of mobility and change that pervades their time, they are interested in ways of rapidly exchanging ideas, rather than embalming the idea in an “object.”57

Commenting on the deliberate brevity of his text, McShine pointed the reader to the rest of his catalogue entry, a photo-essay of over forty pages depicting major political, artistic, cultural, and news events of the 1960s: anti-war protests,

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new alternative lifestyles, the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom or the moon landing, etc. Artworks by such artists as Yves Klein, Yoko Ono, Shigeko Kubota, and Allan Kaprow appeared along images of the Great Wall of China, film stills from Fellini Satyricon (1969), NASA stills and data pages, the evocative montage capturing the spirit of the 1960s. Duchamp was shown playing chess with a nude Eve Babitz at the Pasadena Art Museum (1963) was shown facing an image of hippies bathing in a river, a comparison between nudity with a play on the historical genre of “the nude.” A suite of film stills from Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil (1968) showed actors playing black revolutionaries reading texts by Black Panther members. Especially noteworthy is the juxtaposition of Duchamp’s Handmade Stereopticon Slide (1918–19) and Three Standard Stoppages (1913–14) with news agency photographs of the Black Panther Party on the opposing page; the tripartite composition is echoed by the three horizontal bands that pictured the Panthers protesting, posing with arms and sacked by a police raid (Figure 1.4). In many ways this

1.4 

Pages 148–149 from “Information,” curator Kynaston McShine (The Museum of Modern Art, 1970): © 1970 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photography by Jeffrey Ryan. Left Side: Soichi Sunami, photographer, Marcel Duchamp, Handmade Stereopticon Slide (1918–19); Marcel Duchamp, Three Standard Stoppages (1913–14), © Succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2016.

Conceptual Art and identity politics

47

collocation captures a meeting of the two cultural milieus that formed a context for synthetic conceptualism. By 1970, “Information”—by referencing, measuring, or otherwise activating a social purpose external to art’s self-reflexivity—not only showcased the turn to concepts, but the transition from the analytic to the synthetic proposition within conceptualist practice. Commencing his essay with a summary of a politically turbulent decade, McShine wrote: “The art cannot afford to be provincial, or to exist only within its own history, or to continue to be, perhaps, only a commentary on art. An alternative has been to extend the idea of art, to renew the definition, and to think beyond the traditional categories …”58 “Information,” works from which are discussed in greater detail throughout the book, demonstrates the shift of Conceptual Art to conceptualism, the expansion from a concern only with the discipline and its meaning-granting contexts, to a preoccupation with political realities as a primary point of reference for art. McShine’s approach to the 1960s, concern with information, and modes of referencing political events and actors have continued to evolve, and this direction reverberates in Renée Green’s 1992 Import/Export Funk Office (Figures: 1.5, 1.6). An installation that also exists in digital format, as Gloria Sutton observed it “outlines operations endemic to global capital: built in obsolescence

Renée Green, Import/Export Funk Office, 1992. Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne. Courtesy of the artist and Free Agent Media.

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1.6 

Renée Green, Import/Export Funk Office, 1992. Lexicon, installation detail. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist and Free Agent Media.

and the fallacy of universal access to networks of information.”59 Showing, rather than telling, Green arranged various materials about the history and culture of oppositional American politics on industrial shelves resembling a storage facility or archive, to function as a viewing, listening, or reference library. Evoking Adrian Piper’s Funk Lessons (1982–84) in title and also in the use of institutional frameworks (in Piper’s case the visiting scholar lecture, in Green’s case the archive), it offers for comparison the manifold ways in which cultural forms make meaning inside and around disciplinary boundaries. The sign “Collectanea,” (Latin: “The Sufficiently Abundant Collections”) greets the visitor, framing the work’s concern with the collection of bodies of knowledge, as opposed to just objects, focusing the viewer’s attention on the topic of arrangement itself, and calling attention to the underlying ideologies of taxonomies.60 In capturing, framing, and composing, as if writing with found cultural phenomena, Green analysed knowledge systems in their assumed hierarchies, given procedures of data acquisition, and invisible economies of judgement, encouraging a sustained experience. As Sutton wrote elsewhere: “Even when

Conceptual Art and identity politics

a piece adopts a digital format designed specifically for browsing, Green’s works are durational experiences that reiterate the analogue tropes that preoccupy her practice: indices and protocol (social, political, economic, and technical).”61 Green synthesised strategies developed by Art & Language, Mel Bochner, and specifically Marcel Broodthaers, who documented, classified, and indexed bodies of knowledge putting them on display both as information itself, and as meta-critiques of the assumptions that organise disciplinary and methodological formulations. She considered these Conceptual-based mechanisms through the strategy of chance operations leading from Duchamp, through John Cage to artists such as Robert Smithson, to examine how juxtapositions and form generate meaning as an outcome of exterior forces, how the compositions of objects on display complicate the historical events they reference, and the conclusion we draw as we observe the past retrospectively. Her polyphonous arrangements activated the visual, aural, textual, and contextual aspects of cultural items of various purposes and genres. A case study contact zone, Import/Export consolidated music, print media, video interviews, and printed definitions of slang lexicons, around the popularity of hip-hop music and its cultural background in Germany of the early 1990s. Observing her shared interests with Diedrich Diederichsen—a German cultural critic who specialised in hip-hop music and its context, Green placed books and magazines from Diederichsen’s library with her own and other sources. She also showed a range of exchanges that took place since the 1960s between New York, Los Angeles, and Germany, with key works charting the transformation, migration, and reception of African-American and African diasporic cultures of resistance, as well as other counter-cultural movements. Included were magazines, newspapers, and posters; music stations titled “Diedrich Diederichsen Developmental Tapes” (culled from the music Diederichsen has been listening to since he was twelve); audio and videotaped interviews and conversations between cultural producers and Green or Diederichsen; and several sets of sub-culture slang lexicons with compiled explanatory reading materials and other references. Rendered in zine-like style while mimicking the definition techniques of dictionaries, the lexicons translated counter-cultural language, highlighting instances where words are redefined by usage, for example, the re-use of bad: “ ‘Bad’: Tough, cool; inversion of standard usage; ‘who’s bad enough?’.” Colour-coding cross-referenced the lexicons with other elements in the installation, multiplying the vectors of cultural and semiotic connections, or comparing hip-hop slang with its appropriation by German fans. Displaying a range of scholarship about Black diaspora and critical race studies, Green positioned the viewer to think about how classifications and frameworks impact our understanding of the historical facts and events on display, how their existence as media materials produces for us a world view,

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and what kind of agency the viewer has negotiating interpretation. As Jennifer González wrote: Green’s practice can be seen as a genealogical materialist practice of both macro- and microinstitutional levels. She works to demystify what might be considered familiar mythologies of race and their perpetuation through cultural institutions and taxonomies.62

The installation outlined its own intellectual lineage from the Frankfurt School of inter-war Germany, to the evolution of the Panther Party and its associates. It pointed to Angela Davis as a central influence on contemporaneous intellectual frameworks. The invitation to the work’s first installation in Cologne played a visual joke, splitting the postcard between an image of Angela Davis with her iconic Afro hairstyle, and a bald Theodor Adorno (Figure: 1.7).63 A contrast based on appearance between a revolutionary scholar and her equally famous professor was absurd and meaningless on the one hand, yet relentlessly compelling and profound on the other, underscoring the ways in which appearance can be voluntary or involuntary, or how it is classified by other subjects in a social field that positions people in sets of physical and material relations.

1.7 

Renée Green, Exhibition Invite for the Import/Export Funk Office, Galerie Christian Nagel, 1992. Courtesy of the artist and Free Agent Media.

Conceptual Art and identity politics

Import/Export played out the tension between the directed and the aleatory motion that determines how and at what point in time cultural phenomena emerge, how they get promoted or suppressed, when they return or reappear, and what kinds of transformations they have undergone in the meantime. By tracking the evolution of a set of cultural practices through time and space, Green overlaid artistic strategies with academic methodologies and popular forms as hubs of knowledge about our contemporary condition. For example, hip-hop was shown to be not only a cultural phenomenon, but also an emblem of a period. In one of the rotating interviews on display, the scholar George Lipsitz described the profound statement hip-hop made about the deindustrialisation of working class America. In another interview Diederichsen explained that the identification of the German youth with hip-hop culture was not with the United States as the global super-power, but contrarily, with its African-American counter-culture, which for the young German audience represented an image of resistance. “You cannot misunderstand hip-hop,” Diederichsen exclaimed in one of the interviews, “because you cannot escape its directness.” In response, Green asked whether the return to images from the 1960s is perhaps nostalgic, while Diederichsen brought up disappointment with the generation of the 1960s, which eventually conformed and disappeared into the system. In another featured roundtable, the speakers emphasised that hip-hop is not a form to be taken literally or at face value. They underscored that the perceived homophobia of hip-hop is not necessarily greater than that of white popular culture, despite on-going accusations by music journalism to that effect. Naming the strategy as “preventative speeches,” Diederichsen described the pre-written song introductions Ice-T would deliver in every concert, either out of diplomacy or pure opportunism, to give the audience context for the lyrics. This type of move to introduce the context for the work’s interpretation was developed in the plays of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, forming another relation to the installation’s cultural juncture with the Frankfurt School, another contact zone reimagined. Featuring academic, journalistic, and fictional texts, Import/Export offered a new canon for expansive abolitionist thinking and solidarity building capacity. The list of materials can be read like a syllabus for a humanities course about the 1960s, race relations in the United States, or countercultures.64 It extended a bibliography rather than a political program, refusing to interpret for the viewer. The work’s operation can be described as follows: art, used as a tool of visual analysis, helps us understand how aesthetics organise political vocabulary, and in return, how the socio-economic systems in which we live determine how we organise our sensorial order, from how we formulate an aesthetic disposition or our sense of being, to how our judgements formulate our taste, all of which are influenced by our location, on a grid of social

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relations. But to sustain the idea of art as a philosophical tool alone was not enough, since philosophy itself was already understood to be an outcome of an ideological matrix shaped by period or epistemology, operating through such structures and machinations as universities, exhibitions and publications, and the exclusions and limitations that govern them. Ideas did not simply move through frictionless ether, they were heavily filtered by complex signification machines, such that analytic propositions were far from sufficient tools to help us understand how art functions between these layers. Green’s work is one of the many revisions of conceptualism and identity politics that took place in early 1990s, as the artistic strategies of both were being historicised and critically evaluated. With it we began to see a more comprehensive understanding of the 1960s that did not overlook the integrative models that brought identity to bear on class struggle.65 Conclusion: the definition of identity, the definition of politics

In her introduction to Subject To Display, Jennifer González addresses Hal Foster’s “Artist as Ethnographer” (1996) as one of the more critical and intelligent responses to art practices of the 1990s. Nevertheless, she pointed out, Foster still persisted, like most critics of the time, to read the work of artists in terms of their race or gender, assigning “identity” as subject matter, whether artists categorise their practices as such or not. She stated: “By focusing on the notion of identity as a valorizing representation of the “self,” many scholars ignore the possibility that the artworks in question might be intended to dismantle categories of identity, to reject essentialist notions of ethnicity, to destabilize typologies of containment.”66 The tendency to read the work in terms of the artist’s perceived identity became a prevalent problem, as Jennifer Doyle summarised: Worse, the work’s politics will be put through a distortion chamber, and its critical dimensions will be reversed. In all of these cases, the artist’s racial or ethnic identity will orient discussion of her work, resolving the work’s difficulty by pointing to the artist’s identity as its ultimate meaning. It is important to bear in mind that artists know all of this.67

“It is important to bear in mind that artists know all of this”: artists have indeed had awareness of this problem since, at least the late 1960s, if not always. What has also been extant since the 1960s is the ability to extrapolate from one identity to the other, to use the existence of identity, whether emanating from the subject or defined by circumstances, as a counter-hegemonic principle, and not as a defining characteristic attributed to individuals. The return to conceptualism discussed by Silvia Kolbowski, as quoted in the epigraph at the start of this chapter, and which will be discussed again in relation to her work,

Conceptual Art and identity politics

coincided with artists defining new approaches to identity politics, as they interpreted what it is that happened in the 1960s. When they both returned, if you believe they ever left, both concepts were transformed. Notes 1 Huey P. Newton, “A Letter from Huey Newton to the Revolutionary Brothers and Sisters about the Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements,” The Black Panther newsletter, August 21, 1970. Reprinted in To Die for the People: The Writing of Huey P. Newton, ed. Toni Morrison (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009), 154. 2 Cited from Simon Leung, “Contemporary Returns to Conceptual Art: Renée Green, Silvia Kolbowski, and Stephen Prina,” Art Journal 60, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 69. 3 Peter Osborne, “Survey,” in Conceptual Art: Themes and Movements, ed. Peter Osborne (London: Phaidon, 2002), 13–51. 4 Examples of revisions are: Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, eds., Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965–1975 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1995); Jane Farver, ed., Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999); Jon Bird and Michael Newman, eds., Rewriting Conceptual Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1999); Osborne, ed., Conceptual Art; and Michael Corris, ed., Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 5 Lauren Gail Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 6 Faith Ringgold chronicles her involvement in many of the protests in We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995). 7 Bridget R. Cooks, “Black Artists and Activism: Harlem on My Mind, 1969,”American Studies 48, no. 1 (Spring 2007), 5–39. 8 Sparked by the violation of a Takis Vassilakis artwork by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the original group included Takis, Wen-Ying Tsai, Hans Haacke, Willoughby Sharp, Liza Béar, John Perreault, and Carl Andre. 9 Documents from Open Hearing, School of the Visual Arts, April 10, 1969, www. primaryinformation.org/index.php?/projects/art-workers-coalition. 10 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak introduced the notion of strategic essentialism, only to partially reject it later due to its various misuses—mainly its employment as a license to continue and rely on essentialist notions of identity for unity without interrogating their terms and thus challenging their negative effects. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, eds. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 3–32. Several key works have since challenged the distinctions between essentialist and constructivist approaches to identity. See Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (London: Routledge, 1990). Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) is key to art history in this respect. Also see Helen Molesworth, “Cleaning Up in the 1970s: The Work of Judy Chicago, Mary Kelly and Mierle Laderman Ukeles,” in Rewriting Conceptual Art, eds. Michael Newman and Jon Bird (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 107–122.

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11 I define minority as a historically marginalised group. See the influential anthology: Russell Ferguson et al., eds., Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 12 Étienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, trans. James Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994). 13 Gina Dent, “Editor’s Note,” in Black Popular Culture: A Project, eds. Gina Dent and Michele Wallace (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1992), ix. 14 Angela Davis, “Black Nationalism: The Sixties and the Nineties,” in Black Popular Culture, eds. Dent and Wallace, 323. 15 Davis was Genet’s French interpreter during his Los Angeles visit in 1970. 16 Huey P. Newton, “Speech Delivered at Boston College, November 18, 1970”; and “On the Defection of Eldridge Cleaver from the Black Panther Party and the Defection of the Black Panther Party from the Black Community: April 17, 1971,” in To Die for the People, ed. Morrison, 20–38, 44–53. Newton’s dialectics have been criticised as inaccurate. In retort, although Newton indeed tended to misattribute the origins of his ideas, his incredibly astute analysis of the workings of oppression and his outstanding ability to lead the implementation of programs in face of the most adverse conditions make his critics seem petty. For a recent reassessment see Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 17 Erik H. Erikson and Huey P. Newton, In Search of Common Ground: Conversations with Erik H. Erikson and Huey P. Newton (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1973), 28. In the introduction, sociologist Kai T. Erikson describes the tense atmosphere of Newton’s reception at Yale and the foundational misunderstandings that produced that climate. 18 Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy,” Studio International 178, no. 915 (October 1969): 136. 19 For the persistence of the term and its contentions see: Joan W. Scott, “Experience,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 22–40. 20 Gudrum Inboden, “Introduction: Joseph Kosuth—Artist and Critic of Modernism,” in Joseph Kosuth: The Making of Meaning—Selected Writings and Documentation of Investigations on Art Since 1965, trans. Rosemary Kunisch (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie, 1981), 11–29. 21 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990), 105–143. Also see Joseph Kosuth and Seth Siegelaub, “Reply to Benjamin Buchloh on Conceptual Art,” October, no. 57 (Summer 1991): 152–157. 22 The preoccupation with the function of mediation characterised the development of thought throughout the twentieth century, from Marx’s focus on economic mediation, to Freud’s psychoanalysis to Ferdinand de Saussure’s discoveries about the function of language. The second half of the twentieth century saw the application of these ideas to various disciplines, including art.

Conceptual Art and identity politics

23 Cherise Smith, Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 24 For example, Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, eds., “The Last ‘Special Issue’ on Race?” Screen 29, no. 4 (1988). One of the most rigorous and critical re-evaluations of identity politics was John Rajchman’s “The Identity in Question” symposium in 1992, published as an October volume and subsequently a book. It nevertheless failed to contextualise its subject in the rapid social changes that the United States had undergone in the previous thirty years, framing the questions of multiculturalism, identity, representation, power, and experience literally in terms of “today,” rather than considering them as formed by a set of historical/discursive circumstances. John Rajchman, ed., The Identity in Question (New York: Routledge, 1995). The October roundtable about the 1993 Whitney Biennial of American Art, addressed in Chapter 4, is another example where a form/content division guided the debate around political art. For a more recent reassessment see: Beth Hinderliter et al., eds., Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 25 “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 264, 267. 26 Chris Chen, “The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality: Notes Toward an Abolitionist Antiracism,” Endnotes 3 (September 2013). I thank Jaleh Mansoor for introducing the work of Endnotes to me. 27 Sharon Smith, “Black Feminism and Intersectionality,” International Socialist Review 91 (Winter 2013–14): 11. 28 For the concept of intersectionality see Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1,241–1,299. For the recent relevance of intersectionality as a critical Left position see Brenna Bhandar and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “White Feminist Fatigue Syndrome: A Reply to Nancy Fraser,” Critical Legal Thinking: Law and the Political (October 21, 2013), http://criticallegalthinking. com/2013/10/21/white-feminist-fatigue-syndrome/2013. 29 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Policy,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1, no. 8 (1989): 140. 30 Jasbir Puar, “ ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’: Intersectionality, Assemblage, and Affective Politics,” Transversal (2011), 2, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0811/ puar/en2011. 31 For other ways to understand the conditions affecting individuals beyond the concept of the subject see Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds., Who Comes After the Subject? (New York: Routledge, 1991). 32 Puar, “ ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’,” 8. 33 Abigail B. Bakan, “Marxism and Antiracism: Rethinking the Politics of Difference,” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture and Society 20, no. 2 (2008): 252.

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34 This is in contrast to the robust operations of identification, as discussed in Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995). The complexity of identification is addressed in José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 35 Coco Fusco, “Passionate irreverence: the cultural politics of identity,” in 1993 Biennial Exhibition (Whitney Biennial), ed. Elisabeth Sussman (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1993), 77. 36 Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” New Left Review 225 (September/October 1997): 44. Žižek’s essay is an homage to Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). 37 Chon A. Noriega, “On Museum Row: Aesthetics and the Politics of Exhibition,” Daedalus 128, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 61. Also see Michael Brenson, Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Artist in America (New York: New Press, 2001). Culture Wars, a term attributed to various clashes between conservative and progressive positions since the 1920s, is mostly used today as a proper name for the specific set of battles waged around the authority and funding of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) that began in 1989. The controversy in Congress regarding grants given for the exhibition of works by the artists Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, was followed by a series of events and heated debates in the public sphere. Attacks by conservatives had been escalating since the mid-1980s, and were part of a broader attempt by the right wing to defund art, with the argument that art should be a function of the market and not of government support. The strategy used by conservative senators was to demonstrate how public monies were being used for the funding of works they deemed to be “obscene.” The dire outcomes of the “wars” were characterised by Carol Vance: “[t]he regulation has lifted the discussion of obscenity out of the public scrutiny of the courts and landed it in private rooms, where anxious arts administrators, untrained in law, worry about what obscenity might mean and perhaps decide to play it safe and fund landscapes this year.” See her article/essay/text, “Misunderstanding Obscenity,” Art in America 78, no. 5 (May 1990): 49. Also see Richard Bolton, ed., Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts (New York: New Press, 1992); Brian Wallis et al., eds., Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Timothy W. Luke, Museum Politics: Power Plays at the Exhibition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Richard Meyer, “The Red Envelope: On Censorship and Homosexuality,” in Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century U.S. Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3–32; Richard Meyer, “The Jesse Helms Theory of Art,” October 104 (Spring 2003): 131–148; Jonathan D. Katz, “ ‘The Senators Were Revolted’: Homophobia and the Culture Wars,” in A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945, ed. Amelia Jones (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006): 231–248. 38 Noriega, “On Museum Row,” 62.

Conceptual Art and identity politics

39 Donna M. Binkiewicz, Federalizing the Muse: U.S. Arts Policy and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1965–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Joni M. Cherbo and Margaret J. Wyszomirski, eds., The Public Life of the Arts in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000); and Joseph W. Zeigler, Arts in Crisis: The National Endowment for the Arts Versus America (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1994). 40 Renée Green, “Slippages,” in Other Planes of There: Selected Writings by Renée Green, ed. Gloria Sutton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 230. 41 Renée Green et al., eds., Negotiations in the Contact Zone (Lisbon: Assirio and Alvim, 2003). Based on Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge,1992). 42 Green, “Slippages,” 236–238. 43 Žižek, Multiculturalism, 48. 44 Stuart Hall has demonstrated how the representation of minorities affects concrete conditions in policy, designed arrested development, discrimination, stereotyping, etc. See Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: MacMillan, 1978) and Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” in Questions of Cultural Identity, eds. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), 1–17. 45 Kobena Mercer, “ ‘1968’: Periodizing Politics and Identity,” in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 290. Mercer addresses Michele Wallace, “Reading 1968 and the Great American Whitewash,” in Remaking History, eds. Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989), 97–109. 46 Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon, eds., The Duchamp Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 205–224. 47 Hal Foster, “What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?”October 70, The Duchamp Effect (Autumn 1994): 23–25. 48 Walter Hopps later also showcased the work of Joseph Cornell. Both exhibitions were well received by a flourishing local African-American avant-garde scene of artists who together forged a context of alternative exhibition opportunities. For more on David Hammons’s body prints in the context of assemblage, see Connie Rogers Tilton and Lindsay Charlwood, eds., L.A. Object and David Hammons Body Prints (New York: Tilton Gallery, 2011); Kellie Jones, ed., Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2011). 49 I draw this analysis of Duchamp from Juli Carson. 50 The Chicago Eight—Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner and Bobby Seale (whose trial was later separated), were charged with conspiracy to riot during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Injustice Case also evokes the disproportionate sentencing of Seale to four years in jail for contempt of court. 51 Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” October 3 (Spring 1977): 68–81. 52 Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” in Black Skin White Masks, trans. Charles L. Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1976), 116.

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53 Laura Cottingham, “Post-’68: The Aesthetic Legacies of Black Power, Women’s Liberation, and Gay Rights in American Art,” Flash Art 27, no. 174 (January/February1994): 34. 54 In The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault defined the archive as: “the first law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.” Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 129. Naturally, in any forum like October the boundaries of the possibility of knowledge are made visible, as affinities between members are constructed through a certain degree of agreement, which of course allows for the containment of certain disagreements. Differences were allowed as long as “quality” was sustained. Of course, the idea of quality can itself be ideological. 55 The younger participants in this discussion later worked to correct these elisions. See Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). For a criticism of October’s position see Juli Carson “Response to ‘The Reception of the Sixties’,”October 71 (Winter 1995): 144. 56 See Kenneth R. Allan, “Understanding Information,” in Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth and Practice, ed. Michael Corris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 144–168. 57 Kynaston McShine, “Essay,” in Information, ed. Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 139. 58 McShine, “Essay,” 138. 59 Gloria Sutton, “Remarks on the Writings of Renée Green,” in Other Planes of There, ed. Sutton, 27. 60 Parts of the analysis of this work have been previously published in my: “The 1993 Whitney Biennial: Artwork, Framework, Reception,” Journal of Curatorial Studies 2, no. 2 (June 2013): 142–168. 61 Gloria Sutton, “Renée Green: Some Formal Operations,” in Renée Green Catalogue Raisonné, ed. Nicole Schweizer (Lausanne: Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts and JPR Ringier, 2009), 91. 62 Jennifer A. González, “Renee Green, Genealogies of Contact,” in Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 220. 63 Kobena Mercer’s Black Hair/Style Politics comes to mind. Mercer, “Black Hair/ Style Politics,” New Formations, no. 3 (Winter 1987): 33–54, http://banmarchive. org.uk/collections/newformations/03_33.pdf. 64 Some of the books on display are: Jules Régis Debray; Revolution in the Revolution?, 1967; Jerry Farber, The University of Tomorrowland, 1972; Steven E. Deutsch and John Howard, eds., Where it’s at: Radical Perspectives in Sociology 1970; Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 1968; Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 1968; John Hersey, Letter to the Alumni, 1970; Wilfred Cartey and Martin Kilson, eds., The Africa Reader, 1970; Charlotte Leon Mayerson, ed., Two Blocks Apart, 1965; Melvin and Mario van Peebles, No Identity Crisis, 1990; Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964; George F. Kennan, Democracy and the Student Left, 1968; Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels, 1966; John Edgar

Conceptual Art and identity politics

Wideman, Brothers and Keepers, 1984; Angela Y. Davis, If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance, 1971; Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, 1969; Eldridge Cleaver, Post-Prison: Writings and Speeches, 1969; Ernest Tidyman, Shaft, 1971; Ishmael Reed, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, 1967; The Cox Commission, Crisis at Columbia, 1968; Michael Harrington, The Other America, 1962; Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act, 1964; Mark Gerzon, The Whole World is Watching, 1969; Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, 1971; Joseph Newman, Communism and the New Left: What They’re Up to Now, 1969; C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 1938, etc. 65 Also see Isaac Julien, “Black Is, Black Ain’t: Notes on De-Essentializing Black Identities,” in Black Popular Culture: A Project, eds. Wallace and Dent, 255–263; and Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, “Introduction: De Margin and De Centre,” Screen 29, no. 4 (Fall 1988): 2–11. 66 González, Subject To Display, 11. Her disagreement is with Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer,” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 171–204. 67 Jennifer Doyle, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 95. Doyle cites Darby English at length. His excellent book intervened into the problem of over-determining the meaning of work by black artists by engaging the work itself directly, performing close reading based first and foremost in the formal aspects of the work and what the work itself offers the viewer. See Darby English, “fantasias of the Museum,” in How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 137–200.

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Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

Just as Einsteinian science demands that the relativity of the frames of reference be included in the object studied, so the combined action of Marxism, Freudianism and structuralism demands, in literature, the relativization of the relations of writer, reader and observer (critic). (Roland Barthes (1972))1

Adrian Piper’s practice is rooted in the foundational definitions of Conceptual Art. She is also a pioneer of the turn in Conceptual Art from autonomous and self-reflexive practice to a context-based, and then a content-oriented, conceptualism, as she applied the philosophical questions initially reserved for an abstract investigation to observing how race and gender make meaning within the social order.2 Her career trajectory influenced a major tendency towards synthetic proposition art. Yet, during the formation of Conceptual Art and conceptualism in the 1960s and 1970s, the reception of minority artists was still actively suppressed, and Piper and others we now know as key practitioners, David Hammons, Mary Kelly, or Jimmie Durham for example, were denied opportunities to circulate and become paradigmatic at that time, only able to influence younger generations of artists some time later. As they began to enjoy varying degrees of success in the 1980s and 1990s, the reception of their work was filtered through the contemporaneous debates around identity politics. While this approach was not wrong, curators and critics often tended to decontextualise the conceptualist aspects of these artists’ contributions and/ or the impact of their work on the development of conceptualism as a typology of practice. In Piper’s case, historians who understood the significance of her early period had sometimes allowed the reading of the early work to be overdetermined by the overtly political content of her later period.3 More often than not, writing about Piper’s work took a defensive tone, striving to prove that her identity-based work was not autobiographical or essentialist and aiming to reconcile the historical contradictions between her having been at the center of New York’s Conceptual Art scene yet simultaneously marginalised. A chronological approach to her early work can eliminate re-marginalisation and allow us to read the work on its own terms.

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

Initially, when she began working in the late 1960s, Piper had been an “artist’s artist,” known among a close network of peers concentrated around Conceptual Art, such as Sol LeWitt (a colleague and friend), Hans Haacke, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Smithson (mentioned in a work in 1968), Lawrence Weiner (to whom she dedicated an artwork in 1969), and, importantly, Vito Acconci (an early supporter and facilitator of her first public exhibition and circulation). Her photo-text work was later influential on a generation of feminist artists including Cindy Sherman (who cites Piper directly), Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Jenny Holzer, and Louise Lawler, all of whom most likely encountered Piper’s work in Lucy Lippard’s lectures, exhibitions, and catalogues, as well as publications such as Alan Sondheim’s Individuals: Post-Movement Art in America (1977), which circulated widely. Beyond participating in several significant exhibitions in the United States and in Europe, as early as 1972 Piper wrote for Ursula Meyer’s anthology Conceptual Art. “In Support of Meta Art” was published in Artforum in 1973, and she contributed to Joseph Kosuth’s The Fox, the American affiliate of the English Art & Language Press, in 1975.4 This chapter takes a close look at Piper’s transition from Conceptual Art to conceptualism, in the context of Conceptual Art’s canonical interpretations. I observe that her contribution was focused very specifically on questions of mediation—the mediation of content by materials, forms, and language—later considering the mediating power of race, gender, and other forms of apparent difference. It seems that Piper’s recognition of her own place within the social order as constructed rather than intrinsic followed directly from her attention to the relation of form and language as communication vehicles. From the application of analytic thinking to the work of art, she extended her enquiries to the dynamic relationships between the various elements of the artwork, such as object, author, body, self, circulation, and audience reception. It is by fragmenting and reassembling these relations that Piper later moved to broader social questions, using herself as a case study, not as a means to portray a life-story. Piper’s use of the body as an object and an autobiographical tone followed an extended period of preoccupation with the context of the art object, its circulation and reception, and general enquiries into the nature of time and space through a focus on media and mediation. In accordance with this sequence of development, I propose to read her later work in the same way, always first as Conceptual, onto which we can then apply the political question. To enter the work through its analytic base is to read it on the terms of its making, not on the subject position of its maker. The relationship between Concrete Infinity 6 inch Square [“This square should be read as a whole…”] (1968) and Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece (1970), made two years apart, demonstrates my point (Figures: 2.1–2.4).5 In the earlier piece Piper

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2.1 

Adrian Piper, Concrete Infinity 6 inch Square [“This square should be read as a whole … ”], 1968. Pagework: Xerox copy of typescript, 11.5 × 8.5 in. (29.2 × 21.6 cm). Collection of Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

Adrian Piper, Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece, 1970. 57 framed pages with black and white photographs and handwritten-script, each 11.5 × 9.75 in. (29.2 × 24.7 cm). Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchased with funds provided by the Drawings Committee. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

used type on a standard letter page of 8.5 × 11 in. size, employing words not solely for the meaning that they convey, but also as a block of typed letters that render a minimal form—a square on a rectangular ground, meant to be viewed formally in relation to its visual placement on the page. Part of several suites and works that took standard paper and a typewriter as media, Concrete Infinity 6 inch Square activated the referential function of the words by performing an attempt to exhaust the description of a square rendered by language. The words both formed a square and described it. The text used a potentially infinite structure to describe the rendered square. The words read: This square should be read as a whole; or, these two vertical rectangles should be read from left to right or right to left; or, these two horizontal rectangles should be read from top to bottom or bottom to top; or, these four squares should be read from upper left to upper right to lower right to lower left or upper left …

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2.2 

2.3 

Adrian Piper, Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece, 1970. Page 1 of 57 framed pages with black and white photographs and handwritten-script, each 11.5 × 9.75 in. (29.2 × 24.7 cm). Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchased with funds provided by the Drawings Committee. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

Adrian Piper, Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece, 1970. Page 7 of 57 framed pages with black and white photographs and handwritten-script, each 11.5 × 9.75 in. (29.2 × 24.7 cm). Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchased with funds provided by the Drawings Committee. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

2.4 

66

The synthetic proposition

The text was cut when it completed the rendition of a 6 × 6 in. square. Piper’s analysis of the identity of the square is no different than her later examination of the identity of the self; philosophically they raise equivalent questions, asking whether the identity of a thing lies in its description or in its visual appearance. The work also probed whether reception by the viewer functions simultaneously or sequentially, and which of the modes for rendering meaning may supersede the other. This philosophical investigation into the properties of a universal form was a reoccurring theme in Piper’s early work, and led along the same lines into her later analysis of the specificity of race, gender, and class, as well as the way they intersected differently in different people. Almost two years later, Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece (1970) was created as a sequence of diary entries on graph paper, where the artist chronicled her daily activities in an exercise limited by specific parameters. Most of the entries were collaged with a picture she took of herself in the mirror. The pages were later framed and hung as a grid, beginning with instructions that read: Object maintenance write everything I do. Temp & weight on rising & going to bed. Picture once a day. no subject one verb/sentence no incoming information, environmental conditions, sensory input (saw, heard, sensed, touched, tasted) ate, ok, read, ok restrict contact whenever possible

Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece was neither diaristic nor revealing, but rather clinical in its exhaustive description of bodily functions. Juxtaposed with the writing, the photographs acted as additional documentation, proof of existence—a vehicle to communicate information. As with so many modes of knowledge, both words and images revealed more about their limits than about the objects described. Through the two forms of representation, the piece examined whether the person/artist can be regarded as an art object, isolating the idea of “self ” from that of the author and/or subject of the piece. An example of the text read: “Got up at 6:45 AM. Peed and shat. Turned on radio. Weighed 98.5 lbs. body temperature 97.0 F. Made bed.” Piper described daily routines and diet, for example drinking juice or swallowing wheat germ and cod liver oil, as well as her yoga practice, and some of the health and meditation books that she was reading that summer. Her daily whereabouts and activities were logged, as was everything that seems to be objective, for

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

example, self-referential details like descriptions of the work’s making, the time taken to write the diary entries, or take the photograph. The visual quality of the hand-written pages effects a sense of the “personal,” but is contrasted by the dryness of the exhaustive description of bodily functions—a laundry list of so many facts. Here and there the context of the art world appeared, including mentions of delivering work to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and social and professional interactions, such as with Vito Acconci. With less real estate overall, the photographic component of the work offered a lyrical dimension, walking the fine line between intimate appeal and a medical record or social-science aesthetic. The small grainy photographs of the artist, sometimes partially or fully naked, operated as evidence of being, not as a discrete object of art or a pictorial photograph. They were neither “nudes”—as they did not aim to elicit visual pleasure—nor self-portraits intended to convey to the viewer the “essence” of the person photographed. Instead, the photographs fulfilled the purpose of a record, a means for communication. But, like all other means of mediation, the work foregrounds how photography is never neutral or transparent. On the one hand we have the attempts of the artist to simply point and shoot, on the other the selfreflexive incorporation of the recording apparatus in the picture. A glare created by the proximity of the author/artist/object to the mirror flares across the surface of all the photographs, highlighting the presence of the mirror as the object that had bounced the light, and had rendered the self as a separate entity, an other. The glare points to the surface of the photographic print as a place of inscription, suspending it between an object to be looked at and a surface to be read. If we can identify an autobiographical or corporeal impulse, it is evident that it functions through a structural rather than a narrative strategy. Thus just as Concrete Infinity 6 inch Square (1968) isolated the two modes of describing a square, as text and as image, Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece (1970) isolated the artist as an object, from the artist as a subject with an intrinsic sense of self. Clearly, this is not actually possible in any full sense; however, as an exercise, it opened up ways to examine these distinctions between self, identity, and subjectivity, and to activate them as items within the work of art, an inventory of positions to work with. From this point on, Piper developed a careful investigation of the idea and nature of “self,” treating herself first as an object within the artwork, and later as a case study for mapping social and political issues. The rest of this chapter will trace the transformation of the early Conceptual preoccupations into the later social ones, and introduce previously unpublished evidence of Piper’s distinct approach to the objectification of the self, to the attempt to isolate the “self ” as part of an artistic experiment. It is this self that surfaces in the synthetic conceptualism of much 1980s and 1990s art, where artists

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rethought Duchamp’s interventions into the conventions of artistic authorship, persona, and identity, with the vantage point of poststructuralist, postcolonial, queer, and feminist theory, a “meta-self,” rooted in critical identity politics, part of a sweeping shift in attitude in many of the disciplines. Disciplinary and interdisciplinary conceptualism

Conceptual Art is widely recognised as one of the most influential movements in contemporary art.6 By the time Conceptual Art of the 1960s expanded into conceptualism in the 1970s, artists and critics already considered its original claims to purity to be an endgame or a myth.7 The problem now is to identify those characteristics of conceptualism that are neither constrained by the orthodoxy of purity nor so open as to include any practice vying for this legacy. Early practitioners of Conceptual Art shared a sense of crisis with the modernist project and an emphasis on the cerebral aspect of artmaking.8 The preoccupation with language or information, the turn to new technologies or alternative media (including the body as medium), and the relocation of art’s site beyond the studio or established exhibition spaces, together evidence a new attitude to which no one position can be credited. In the intellectual circles of New York boundaries between disciplines had already eroded by the 1960s: experimental music, happenings, dance, and mail art showcased hybrid practices, and artists like John Cage and Robert Morris were reinvigorating Marcel Duchamp’s cerebral strategies. An interest in chance operation, seriality, a material sense of language, and art driven by non-subjective systems opened up the boundaries of art such that a variety of activities could be considered art. Nevertheless, of all the available umbrella terms to explain this new mode of artmaking, it was concept-art that endured as an overarching term, not only because of the authority of its early defenders, but because it was the most fitting to describe the paradigm shift that took art from modernism to postmodernism, from work based on specific media, expression, and notions of artists authorship and originality, to interdisciplinary influences, intervention, post-humanist thinking, appropriation, etc. This broad shift in the attitude toward artmaking (and also in the various disciplines of the arts, letters, and their study) was characterised by critical distance on the subjects or objects, and the recognition that art is no longer a means of direct expression. There was growing awareness to how context affects the meaning of artwork, and the understanding that the materials and forms of the work or the language from which it has been woven (whether visual or textual) always already carry meaning that reflects the broader structures (social, political, economic, etc.) that shape them. Piper’s development corresponds with the change in the conception of the literary work articulated by Roland Barthes in 1971 as a shift “From

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

Work to Text.”9 Barthes was a major contributor to the method of “reading images,” where images are considered not only for what they manifest visually but also for the ideologies they convey or serve, itself part of the larger cultural turn to a contextual way of thinking.10 His insights offered criteria for distinction within the humanities, but also for understanding broader cultural trends, and most definitely art. Barthes’ influence on artists of the late 1960s was direct, as his ground-breaking “Death of the Author” appeared in the significant periodical Aspen 5–6, “The Minimalism Issue,” in 1967.11 An earlier manifestation of this shift was evident in the proto-postmodernism of Duchamp, which influenced the 1960s tendency to consider the work of art as part of a system that impacts how art is understood. Artists and writers began to take into account structure, context, language, and ideology as forces affecting the meaning of the work, not just the artist or the work as the catalyst or loci of change. The shift from “work” to “text” had been present sporadically throughout history, Barthes explained, but was becoming evident in the 1960s, as a change in the way the literary work exists and functions. More a series of notes than an essay, “Death of the Author” first established that the most significant epistemological breaks leading to late twentieth-century thinking were put into effect by the works of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, changes taking place as a series of slippages, formed by different disciplines pushing against each other. On the heels of Marxism and psychoanalysis the understanding that objects and language mediate reality influenced the subsequent developments in structural and poststructural theories. All of these brought to light the condition within which the distinction between the work of art and its life in circulation had been eroded. It made relative the concepts of a “work,” and a Text with a capital “T”. The “work” sits on a shelf in the library, or circulates as a commodity, while the Text takes place in reading, not only existing in a broad inter-textual field of relations and associations, but also “rewritten” in every instance of reception, impossible to fix through classification or interpretation. The Texts of Georges Bataille were a primary example for Barthes, as they could never have one true interpretation, resisting classification by disciplinary categorisation or evaluation by genre. Reception (where the “Death of the Author” became the birth of the reader) was a site of proliferating sense, collapsing the hierarchy of the sign, and pushing meaning along infinitely through metonymic chains. Mediation was a prominent subject of intellectual concern throughout the twentieth century. Conceptual artists turned to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953) where he foregrounded philosophy’s error in ignoring the insufficiency of language as a conduit for ideas. Conceptual Art was part and parcel of a growing realisation that meaning is always mediated, that it is never entirely in the hands of its

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maker, but rather determined by a host of elements that already form a framework of analysis. Artists considered the dependency of their work’s interpretation upon its given vocabulary, materials, forms, the figure of the artist, exhibition contexts, distribution circuits, and the economies of market and later politics, making all of the above the subject matter of self-reflexive art. But this realisation was not unique to art or to Wittgenstein. Mediation and framework had also become the focus of various disciplines and were at the heart of the epistemological shift of structural and poststructural theory.12 The philosophical focus on the topic of mediation impacted the reconsideration of concepts ranging from subject-hood to citizenship, as well as the development of 1960s politics and counter-cultures into the particular movements of Black Power, second wave feminism, gay rights, and later queer activism, and the ways all of the above were re-examined in scholarly discourses and the arts throughout the later twentieth century.13 Of essence here is the ways in which philosophical enquiries migrated to pragmatic discourses that affected policy and politics, on the one hand, and aesthetic shifts in the arts and humanities, on the other. For Peter Osborne the relationship to philosophy was Conceptual Art’s most important characteristic. Examining the internal debates between groups and artists, he formulated two major categories: one, an expansive and inclusive “weak” Conceptualism exemplified by Sol LeWitt, as opposed to the restrictively analytical “strong” practice of Joseph Kosuth and the British group Art & Language. Along these lines Osborne further distinguished between the uses of philosophy as means of artmaking versus the practice of art as itself a philosophical activity that ontologically questioned the status of the work of art: Thus, on the one hand, philosophy functions within the artistic field as a specific form of artistic or critical material or productive resource for a practice the logic of which is supposedly autonomous or immanently artistic. On the other hand, philosophy retains its own immanent criteria of intellectual adequacy as itself a relatively autonomous cultural practice. That is, one may judge the adequacy of the philosophical ideas in play in the art world both ‘strictly philosophically’ and from the standpoint of their contribution to the transformation of artistic practices. The idea of Conceptual art, in the exclusive or strong sense, is the regulative fantasy that these two sets of criteria may become one. The practice of strong Conceptualism was the experimental investigation—the concrete elaboration through practice—of the constitutive ambiguity produced by this founding double-coding.14

For Osborne, LeWitt’s practice did not ultimately challenge art’s objectstatus and hence, as opposed to LeWitt’s writing, remained in effect more minimalist than Conceptualist. Furthermore for Osborne, engagement with

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

philosophy was not a guarantee for a strict reading of “art as idea,” as he explained: Adrian Piper, a staunch defender of an inclusive LeWittian Conceptualism, not only went on to study analytical philosophy, but became a professional philosopher, while continuing her career as an artist. However, she did not thereby become what I am calling a strong or an exclusive Conceptualist. For while she used (and continues to use) her philosophical work in her art—often making work directly about her philosophical reflections—her philosophical interests are not in the concept of art itself, but in the broader metaphysical notions of space, time and selfhood, the experience of which her art explores. (Initially, in a formal LeWittian manner; subsequently, in more social and political contexts, characterized by her interests in feminism and the politics of race.) For this LeWittian strand of Conceptualism, it is the infinite plurality of media that the idea of Conceptual art opens up which is the point, not the exploration of that idea itself, directly, as art.15

If we pass over what sounds like a qualitative judgement in Osborne’s weak versus strong designations, we find in his argument the important observation that Kosuth’s brand of Conceptual Art was able to undo the modernist unity of aesthetics and autonomous self-reflexivity. Moreover, Osborne also did not spare practitioners of “strong” Conceptualism his criticism, emphasising that their response to the crisis with Greenbergian modernism reintroduced a romantic notion of artistic intentionality under this new authoritative guise. Critical of Kosuth’s philosophy he wrote: “The propositional positivism of Kosuth’s idea of art derives directly from A.J. Ayer, whose writings provided the medium for the translation of the formalist idea of autonomy as selfreferentiality into the idiom of the analytical proposition.”16 Here, Osborne points to continuity between Kosuth’s notion of the analytic proposition and a Kantian notion of self-referential aesthetics, positioning Kosuth as extending, rather than negating, a modernist attitude. Kosuth’s disciplinary intervention was formulated against the theories of dominant critic Clement Greenberg, who narrated the principles of an American avant-garde as a continuation and zenith of the advancements of its European forebears towards full abstraction.17 For Greenberg, who relied on the philosophy of Emmanuel Kant, American abstraction completed painting’s progression from external reference towards ultimate autonomy—able to be self-critical by emphasising its intrinsic properties. What Osborne overlooked in his account, however, is the possibility that Piper’s early work was in fact reconciling Kosuthian and LeWittian approaches, and that the plurality of media was not merely an opening of art outwards, but rather part and parcel of the vast contemporaneous acknowledgement that fine art shared with all other arts a reliance on language, not only for its

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description and interpretation but in its very structure. Piper’s use of photography, music, performance, or Concrete Poetry in her oeuvre was not for the mere sake of media pluralism, but because her preoccupation was with a comparative examination of notational systems that operated in the gaps between instructions, descriptions, or documentation of experiences or events. Piper was not, as Osborne claimed, using Conceptual Art and then conceptualism to render experience, but rather as an investigation of the various ways that art could make itself manifest. Her work asked where along the process between conception and reception “art” itself appeared, and how the relation of the author to the object came to be configured thus that it affected the meaning of the work. Complicating the relationship of the artist to her selfhood also meant that Piper placed a different emphasis on intentionality than Kosuth. She allowed her art to operate in the world, and only then drew conclusions based on her perception of its reception, as evidenced in her elaborate writing, where she explained the development of her attitude towards her role as author, performer, or audience of her own activities. However, it is important to remember not only that Piper’s interest in selfhood began at a much later stage, but that it activated a different notion of “selfhood” than defined within modernist art. Her early use of her body was deliberately void of subjective perspective. It followed from her even earlier work which, under the influence of LeWitt, was structured on his premises that “[t]he idea becomes a machine that makes the art […] To work with a plan that is pre-set is one way of avoiding subjectivity.”18 Piper synthesised LeWitt’s preoccupation with seriality (as a means to reject the subjective work of composing) with Kosuth’s dictum that the goal of art is to define art, but without Kosuth’s disciplinary adherence to art’s self-reflexivity and, hence, autonomy.19 Instead, Piper’s work mapped relations of dependency and mediation between humans and objects in an economy of material and meaning. An alternative to Osborne’s distinction would be to think of disciplinary and interdisciplinary Conceptual Art.20 Arguably, all Conceptual Art was interdisciplinary, as even “pure” Conceptualism was heavily invested in philosophy, a discrete academic discipline at that point. However, since Conceptual Art wielded philosophy against the dominance of Abstract Expressionism, it demarcated its boundaries as a disciplinary debate with modernist formalism. Piper’s work initially dialogued with a disciplinary Conceptual Art that extended the preoccupations of minimalism and its debate with modernist Abstract Expressionism.21 From minimalism to conceptualism, 1967–68

Piper’s introduction to contemporaneous art came in 1967, during her studies at the School of Visual Arts in New York, when she began subscribing to

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

magazines and visiting galleries.22 Minimalism was initially the point of her engagement, as in a series of works from 1967, each named Untitled Construction, where she worked with the difference between actual space and its rendered dimension. Although Piper destroyed the series, notebooks of preparatory sketches and photographic documentation reveal her logic.23 Made from panels and canvases, the works collapsed the distinction between painting and sculpture, foundational to the—still dominant—criticism of Clement Greenberg, where painting’s fidelity to its flat essence was a primary criterion in its judgement. One Untitled Construction consisted of a 3 × 4 ft construction with two canvased panels hinged along one side and held open at about ten degrees by wire. A rectangular opening in the frontal view of the external canvas revealed the one behind it. When installed, one canvas would have been attached to the wall as a traditional painting; the other protruded into space, becoming a “specific object,” in the sense meant by Donald Judd when he described work that was “neither painting nor sculpture.”24 These interests were well summarised in one surviving work, Nine-Part Floating Square (1967), which included a suite of nine 18 × 18 in. stretched canvases hung, six inches apart, on a 1 × 1 ft grid, forming together a gestalt of an 5.5 × 5.5 ft square. A grid drafted in pencil traversed both the canvases and the wall on which they hung. Proportionate to this grid, a translucent wash rendered a square within the deeper taupe of the unprimed canvases, not centered, but shifted two notches down and to the right, causing the viewer’s eye to dance back and forth between seeing the painted square, the squares of the hanging stretchers, and the larger gestalt square. The pencilled grid had a dual function: on the wall it became a measurement tool to align the objects and on the canvases it was the figure on the background of the warp and weft of the fabric’s weave. The grid underscored the distinction between the flatness of the wall and the object-ness of the canvases, their dimensionality emphasised by the shadows they cast on the wall underneath them, as if the sole purpose of their bare existence, created from the most basic materials and vocabulary of painting, was to defy Greenberg’s modernist criteria of flatness. Yet, as opposed to Greenberg’s view of autonomous painting, Nine-Part Floating Square made the wall an integral part of the work in the vein of Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, or LeWitt.25 These investigations then began moving from the wall to the floor, sometimes activating the space in between. In Inflated Plastic Dropcloth Wall Piece (1967) and Inflated Plastic Dropcloth Floor Piece (1967), Piper captured air inside transparent sheets, creating dimension from flat materials, and designating the wall and the floor space as part of the piece (Figures: 2.5, 2.6). Untitled Three-Part Floor Construction, from February of 1968, played with various permutations of gridded and painted areas using paper, creosote, primer, and pencil. Made from tape, Floor Grid (1968) was later developed

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2.5 

Adrian Piper, Inflated Plastic Dropcloth Wall Piece, 1967. Wood, dropcloth, dimension variable. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. © APRA Foundation Berlin.

2.6 

Adrian Piper, Inflated Plastic Dropcloth Floor Piece, 1967. Wood, dropcloth, dimension variable. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. © APRA Foundation Berlin.

further as Untitled Four-Part Floor Construction (1968) by adding the grid of ceramic tile, which, sitting on top of the floor, played on both the dimensional aspect of tile and also on the status it accrued by occupying the space of sculpture. Overall these preoccupations reveal a young artist pushing the limits of media-specific concerns at the moment when the distinction between painting and sculpture was being collapsed.

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

Adrian Piper, Infinitely Divisible Floor Construction, 1968. Installation: tape and tiles on floor. Dimensions variable. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

Throughout 1968 Piper continued to create several Untitled Floor Constructions, Untitled Wall Constructions, and a series of works called Found Loft Sculpture, in which she used tape, paint, and translucent plastic sheeting in a variety of combinations to demarcate various rectangular areas in her loft as “art.” Here, we see her transition from minimalist preoccupation with space and sculpture to a Duchampian gesture, where the artist’s authority endows a found object the status of an artwork, and which was foundational for Conceptual Art.26 Both Benjamin Buchloh and Charles Harrison saw Conceptual Art as advancing the concerns of minimalism. Buchloh constructed his formative article, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” by demonstrating the development of each of his Conceptual case studies as responding to a minimalist artist. He emphasised the work of LeWitt, whom he regarded as proto-Conceptualist: It seems crucial to remember that the oppositions within the formation of Conceptual Art arose partly from the different readings of Minimal sculpture (and of its pictorial equivalents in the painting of Mangold, Ryman, and Stella) and in the consequences the generation of artists emerging in 1965 drew from those readings—just as the divergences also resulted from the impact of various

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artists within the Minimalist movement as one or another was chosen by the new generation as its central figures of reference.27

Common to the practices of LeWitt, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and the postminimalist artists were the ways in which they produced a work without composing, by making an artwork the outcome of a diagrammatic plan rigorously outlined in advance.28 These methods were developed by American artists as means to surpass the dominance of modernist European preoccupations, the paradigm sustained until the 1950s in a field dominated by Greenbergian discourse and the artists it supported. For Harrison, the weight of the artistic shift lay with minimalism. Rooted in its relation to modernist discourse precisely by revising modernism’s logic of reduction with a qualitative emphasis, minimalism replaced the artistic preoccupation with either painting or sculpture with a focus on the “object.” As he explained: “The general point being made is that—in their American forms at least—‘Conceptual Art’ and ‘Dematerialization’ were secondary historical consequences of the qualitative shift which Minimalism represented.”29 For Buchloh, one of the most profound contributions of Conceptual Art was the use of language to attack the heart of traditional art, with its emphasis on vision and visuality: Because 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 that object: its visuality, its commodity status, and its form of distribution. Confronting the full range of the implications of Duchamp’s legacy for the first time, Conceptual practices, furthermore, reflected upon the construction and the role (or the death) of the author just as much as they redefined the conditions of receivership and the role of the spectator. Thus they performed the post-war period’s most rigorous investigation of the conventions of pictorial and sculptural representation and a critique of the traditional paradigms of visuality.30

For both Buchloh and Harrison the intervention of Conceptual Art, as an outcome of minimalism, was performed in dialectical opposition to the opticality of American abstraction. And while most minimalists and post-minimalists still used language as a means to explain or give production directions for their work, artists such as Carl Andre, Robert Smithson, and Robert Morris (whose post-minimalist practices resided in the vicinity of minimalism and Conceptual Art) had a promiscuous relation to language, when they substituted it for form.31 Piper drew from them both, using language both for instructions and for forming the work itself. Having come of age at the moment of the transition between minimalism and Conceptual Art, it seems that Piper had organically inherited minimalism’s

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

work in space and time, just as she soon thereafter turned to language and other forms of documentation as materials for her work. Both extended directly from her consistent preoccupation with the grid, which she used interchangeably as the ground surface for both making and writing. Yet, Piper’s grid was no longer the modernist universal grid Rosalind Krauss would describe in 1979—the grid that had derived meaning through internal surface relations, declaring the ultimate autonomy of painting, emancipating painting from referencing nature or something in the world.32 It was, rather, a grid that signified the opposite of modernist autonomy, a grid that declared the dependency of meaning upon notational systems and the relation that all notational systems have with one another. It was, in the transition from a minimalist to a Conceptual practice, the cusp of the postmodernist grid, the grid of systems and information, the gritty grid of the city, of documents and maps, a grid of graph paper and notebooks, ready to be inscribed with language and reference to the external world. But, after years of abstraction, reference itself had resurfaced in entirely new ways. No longer a story or an allegory, whatever subject matter the work was pointing to appeared through a new set of devices, foregrounding the very system that mediated it to its audience. Piper had read LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967), which explained his method of using an idea to drive the process and the form of the work. She contacted him after seeing his exhibition 46 Three-Part Variations on 3 Different Kinds of Cubes at the Dwan Gallery in February of 1968. As in LeWitt’s work, the visual manifestation of the work was the outcome of a predetermined verbal description. Influenced by the principles of his installation, she devised a program of exhausting the variations of a proposition. Sixteen Permutations of a Planar Analysis of a Square (1968) was an early example of this tendency that Piper would soon employ in both page and performance works (Figure 2.8). A photostat, printed in negative, it also included a set of formulaic directions to render the squares, a table outlining the permutations, and another table describing the layout of sixteen bird’s eye renditions of the possible divisions of the square, as well as a list of dates for its five drafts between April and October of 1968. Each of the squares was divided into variations on four possibilities for asymmetrical internal divisions based on a 4:3:2:1 ratio for the receding planes, and a 1:3/4:1/2:1/4 ratio for the frontal ones. The rest of the extremely detailed directions described how the series was to proceed in order to produce its particular set of variations and sequential rotations, and also explained how the content of the tables had been annotated. The elegant pattern of squares and rectangles derived its unique sense of cadence and rhythm from the systematic layout. A wood model rendering one of the permutations in three dimensions accompanied the photostat (Figure 2.9). Together they formed a comparison between the written and the drafted examples, brought into relief by the dimensional model. The title indicated that the planar analysis was of a square. However, the renditions

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Adrian Piper, Sixteen Permutations of a Planar Analysis of a Square, 1968. Mixed-media 2.8–2.9  installation: gelatin silverprint on cardboard, wood model, photostat. 32.9 × 21.9 in. (83.5 × 55.5 cm). Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

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and the references to “frontal” and “receding” planes in the verbal description already implied the potential of dimension. Since its actual manifestation realised its potential as a cubical object, it continued Piper’s investigation of the tension between the idea of dimension and actual dimension, as implied in her early Constructions. Furthermore, as the title of the work spoke of a planar analysis of the interior area of a square, it highlighted the paradox that it in effect was using the internal analysis of a square to plan a cube. Foregrounding the divide between the annotation system, the formal appearance of a plan, and its potential dimensional manifestation, pointed the viewer to the significance of the system as such. In 1968, the question this LeWittian type of artwork raised for Rosalind Krauss was: “what does this cumbrous, mechanical joining, or filling of content with form have to do with the enterprise of art?”33 In her review of LeWitt’s 46 Three-Part Variations on 3 Different Kinds of Cubes (1968), Krauss analysed how LeWitt’s work took further the crisis of meaning in art, first addressed in Robert Rauschenberg’s semiotic leveling of images and gestures by reducing them to the function of the sign. For Krauss, it was as if LeWitt’s total mathematical system was introduced in order to fill the absence of meaning implied in Rauschenberg’s work. But this left her with an open-ended question: where exactly did this totality reside? In the diagram, title, or the mathematical formulation that drove the work?34 Approximately twenty years later, as if answering Krauss’s question by locating the site of the work’s operation, Buchloh concluded that LeWitt’s work did not in fact consider the “idea” component of the work more important than its perceptual manifestation. He wrote: “Rather than privileging one over the other, LeWitt’s work (in its dialogue with Jasper Johns’s legacy of paradox) insisted on forcing the inherent contradictions of the two spheres (that of the perceptual experience and that of the linguistic experience) into the highest possible relief.”35 Understanding LeWitt’s premise early on, Piper pushed the limits of this clash between the words and their physical manifestation. Conceptual Art made manifest minimalism’s critical potential by placing even more emphasis on the idea aspect of the work and less on the phenomenological experience of its outcome. Piper literalised the meaning implicit in the minimalist investigation and made it explicit during her transition between minimalism and Conceptual Art.36 Throughout this period she moved back and forth from work with direct reference to political issues or events to a “pure” conceptualism that involved the abstract idea in its negotiation with visual and other notational systems. Time: from infinity constructions to concrete infinities

The many permutations of Piper’s grids emphasised the mediating function of images and language, the passage of time appearing by example. However, Piper’s

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

conception of time was not entirely similar to that of minimalist artists, which regarded time temporally, as in the time needed to circle around the minimalist art object in order to perceive it. Modernist critic Michael Fried identified this characteristic negatively as minimalism’s “theatricality.”37 Instead, in Piper’s Infinitely Divisible Floor Construction (1968) and other works that implicitly asked the viewer to follow a thought or its manifestation, a progressive sense of time was cultivated as a “staying with” the piece (Figure 2.7). In Piper’s temporal model the viewer would theoretically advance with the piece, and would be present with the work at every point in time. This different mode of viewingin-time highlighted the discrepancy between looking at an object of perception and the timeless conception of the idea of infinity. This is important to stress given Piper’s later formulation of the notion of “the indexical present,” which is a very different use of the term “present” than Fried’s.38 In many ways Piper’s notion of presence corresponded to a larger shift in attitude towards the concept of time, as outlined by Pamela Lee in Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (2004), where Lee traced the preoccupation of artists and art historians with the topic of time to the influence of systems theory and cybernetics. Mapping how a phenomenon is organised in disciplines ranging from biology to social science, systems theory observed the commonalities in complex entities, and used mathematical models to describe them. Lee unpacked the implication of systems theory’s “impurity” and its consequent ability to be a conduit between the various disciplines: “Here, then, minimalist objecthood assumes a new contextual meaning: Fried’s theatricality gets recoded as Burnham’s systematicity. Objects, too, take on different readings. They are caught up in a dialogue between minimalist criticism and systems discourse.”39 The preoccupation with temporality was part of the negation put into motion by an anti-avant-garde practice, a “post-formalist esthetic” turned into “systems esthetic,” as the art theorist Jack Burnham identified in 1968, where “change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done.”40 A broad set of systems theories were developed mostly from the practice of biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, whose ground-breaking holistic method was to observe the interrelation of forces balancing elements in a system, teasing out all that is in common to systems such as living organisms, machines, organisations, etc. Cybernetics, the study of information, communication, feedback, and control, overlapped with general systems theory. The ability to describe complex sets of relations between components of various kinds of systems made this new theoretical model applicable to fields ranging from sociology to economics. Open to interdisciplinary proliferation, systems theory appeared in art to contrast the media-specificity of modernism, as in Luke Skrebowski’s classification of Conceptual Art: Rather than following Benjamin Buchloh’s entrenched, if no longer hegemonic, account of conceptual art’s origins in an “aesthetic of administration” and telos

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in a “critique of institutions”, I trace an alternative genealogy (one picked up by a contemporary generation of relational and context artists) that sees conceptual art as imbricated with post-formalist “systems” art such that we can identify a systematic mode of conceptual art. This alternative account prioritises conceptual art’s relation to “technological rationality” (as borrowed from Herbert Marcuse by the critic Jack Burnham) instead of focusing on its relation to “administration” (as borrowed from Max Weber by Buchloh). Systematic Conceptual Art rejected Greenbergian formalism as a suitable account of the ontology of autonomous art. It turned instead to Systems, Information, Cybernetics and, somewhat inconsistently, Critical Theory, in an assault on an aesthetic art historically rendered heteronomous.41

Like many of the artists, such as Hans Haacke, initially drawn to systems theory for its ostensible scientificity and later observing its flaws, Piper was quick to recognise the ways in which personal issues configured into a systematic analysis of time. The shift can be seen in the transition between two works. The second work, originally named Five Unrelated Time Pieces and later reframed as Meat into Meat, was created around the same time as A Conceptual Seriation Arrested at Four Points in Time (also titled Chemical Process Paintings), in the fall of 1968 (Figures: 2.10–2.13). In the latter, Piper submerged metal plates inside four photo-developing trays with chemical solution, photographing the outcome that the corroding metal produced on the surface at fixed intervals to demonstrate the passage of time. The photographs were presented with this information and accompanied by a written sheet explaining the process that produced them. Similarly, Meat into Meat originally attempted to examine the transformation of five units by documenting a pound of meat divided into four hamburgers, cooked, and consumed by Piper’s partner, whom she considered the fifth unit. The objective was to demonstrate transformation as a function of time. However, in application, the emotional reactions of the subjects overwhelmed the outcome. A devout vegetarian, Piper vehemently disagreed with her boyfriend whose escalating expression of frustration with her is evident in the photographs documenting the piece.42 Piper conceived the work as an attempt to measure time objectively, but the implementation of the work suffered from subjective disruption, humorously revealing the intervention of subjectivity to scientific objectivity. It ultimately foregrounded for Piper, and in the work, that the human conception of reality is affected by perception. The attempt to abstract the notion of time was brought to earth and transformed into an investigation of the impact that our embodied experience of things has on our ability to isolate, conceptualise, and transmit our sense of space and time through various forms of representation. Five Unrelated Time Pieces/Meat into Meat was the first in the Hypothesis series (1968–70), which focused on the interaction and continuity of the

Adrian Piper, A Conceptual Seriation Arrested at Four Points in Time, 1968. Documentation notebook: 6 original concepts and 4 descriptions in typescript on paper, 25 color photographs on cardboard: page 2: Four Unrelated Time Pieces: from October 15, 1968, 11 × 8½ in. (27.9 × 21.6 cm). Collection of Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. © APRA Foundation Berlin.

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Adrian Piper, A Conceptual Seriation Arrested at Four Points in Time, 1968. Documentation notebook: 6 original concepts and 4 descriptions in typescript on paper, 25 color photographs on cardboard: page 5: Four Unrelated Time Pieces: fourth draft from October 30, 1968, 8½ × 11 in. (21.6 × 27.9 cm). Collection of Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. © APRA Foundation Berlin.

Adrian Piper, A Conceptual Seriation Arrested at Four Points in Time, 1968. Documentation notebook: 6 original concepts and 4 descriptions in typescript on paper, 25 color photographs on cardboard: page 6: Four Unrelated Time Pieces: from October 22, 1968, 4:15 P.M., 8½ × 11 in. (21.6 × 27.9 cm). Collection of Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. © APRA Foundation Berlin.

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Adrian Piper, A Conceptual Seriation Arrested at Four Points in Time, 1968. Documentation notebook: 7 original concepts and 4 descriptions in typescript on paper, 25 color photographs on cardboard: page 6: Four Unrelated Time Pieces: from October 23, 1968, 4:15 P.M., 8½ × 11 in. (21.6 × 27.9 cm). Collection of Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. © APRA Foundation Berlin.

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

human body as an object among the objects and materials that existed around it on the matrix of time and space. Politics were not yet addressed as a separate entity to be dealt with as a primary concern, but rather as part of the mix included within the preoccupation with the paradox of concrete infinity—an impossible proposition of materialising a theoretical concept. Space and time: from concrete language to hypothetical mappings, 1968–70

Following a studio visit with Terry Atkinson of Art & Language in 1968, Piper wrote “Space, Time, Language, Form” as a statement about her work, from which excerpts appeared in a subsequent letter to Atkinson and as an artwork in the suite Nineteen Concrete Space-Time-Infinity Pieces (1968–69). A series of documents reveal the editing process, and the transformation of a text into a work of art, with emphasis placed on the choice to make artwork vis-à-vis its textual description, as Piper wrote: “My most recent work is involved with suggesting the general nature of time and/or space through the substitution of language for form (which essentially symbolizes the time or space environments in which it exists).”43 She highlighted the infinite potential of the linguistic description: “Language is, for me, the only way to adequately convey—or at least suggest—the inherent character of, say, an area in space. I could continue to provide information about that space indefinitely.”44 Basic arithmetic was also used to demonstrate infinity through laborious divisions or multiplications of fractions that resulted visually in very long decimals, and conceptually, with a demonstration that these divisions could go on and on. The numerical exercise stood in for yet another kind of language, used differently than its typical use to notate the resolution of problems or to describe natural phenomena. The suite of related page works created between early November 1968 and January 1969 was later collected in a binder titled Nineteen Concrete SpaceTime-Infinity Pieces.45 As their umbrella title indicated, they demonstrated manifestations of time and space, folding time and/or space into various systems such that the viewer/reader could draw comparisons between the written text and a potential physical appearance to emerge either on the page, in the viewer’s mind, or both. Several of the works in the Concrete Infinity series outlined a set of procedures to make a work, while others were closer to concrete poetry, a practice that highlighted the materiality of words. The works took several different tactics and either rendered space on the page, analysed the process of reading, described various actions dealing with time and seriality, or gave directions for the production of a shape or a performance. Some of the works were realised while others remained as scripts or scores, or stood alone as Conceptual artworks. They overlap with a central trajectory of 1960s art, articulated by Liz Kotz in her analysis of the role of language in the art of the 1960s. Highlighting the influence of experimental music,

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happenings, or performance practices linked more to poetry than to theatre, Kotz demonstrated the centrality of writing and directives to minimalist, post-minimalist, and Conceptual Art. She charted the historical relation between texts of dual function that are at once instructions to be carried out and independent autonomous writings: Linking the performance notations of Cage and Fluxus with the fabrication instructions of minimal art, I posit the emergence in the 1960s of a new model for artistic production, in which the work—be it object, image, performance, or installation—is now a specific realization of general schema, and is seen to operate analogously to linguistic statements.46

Piper’s work collapsed the event score—the directions sheet for an event—with the minimalist instructions page. In a sense both were brought closer to the text when predetermined sets of instruction were carried out in the form of writing (or writing as a form), reversing the sides of a tautology.47 Art Sale-Event (1968) was a performance proposal for selling white cardboard cubes for twenty-five cents, each to be stamped with the time, date, and location of the sale, as a type of remark on the commodity status of the artwork and the commercial structure of the art world. Untitled (“This piece stands in a ratio of 1:3…”) (1968) was a work describing itself, where the typewritten text was broken by hard returns, both in lieu of punctuation and in order to maintain its ratio to the page as it read: The piece stands in a ratio of 1:3 to its designated space and is situated to the right center of it it is further characterized by the continuity of its internal parts of which there are 75 these parts being divisible into a number of distinct categories which are internally distributed throughout the total area of the piece in order to supplement the basically logical structure of it as cognizance of this structure is vital.48

Untitled (“ENIL EHT…”) (1968) was written in capitals as a mirrored reflection of the sentence: “The time needed to read a line of print depends on the content & structure of the line.” The text described the very activity the viewer was performing as he or she was seeing both the line rendered by the type on paper and its content; the realisation of the latter was slowed by the constraint of reading mirrored type. Text of a piece for Larry Weiner, 1/14/69 (1969) (Figures: 2.14, 2.15) consisted of a textual description of a recorded tape (length 600; @ 7½ IPS), and an additional three pages covered with type that progressed in the following way: “The length of this single recorded section is approximately 15 minutes. Or, the length of these 2 recorded sections are approximately 7 minutes, 30 seconds each. Or, the length of these 4 recorded sections are approximately 3 minutes, 45 seconds each …” ending with a very lengthy fraction after three pages of type with: “ ‘Or, etc.’

Adrian Piper, Text of a Piece for Larry Weiner, 1/14/69, 1969. Documentation notebook: page 1: original typescript carbons on bond paper 11 × 8½ in. (28 × 21.5 cm). © Generali Foundation Collection—Permanent Loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

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Adrian Piper, Text of a Piece for Larry Weiner, 1/14/69, 1969. Documentation notebook: page 4: numerical drawing, ballpoint pen on graph paper, 11 × 8½ in. (28 × 21.5 cm). © Generali Foundation Collection—Permanent Loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

(Progression continues for total duration of the tape).” Highlighting procedure over content, or rendering procedure as content, the piece focused solely on the structural aspects of its making; the content of the recorded segment was never mentioned or described. It also pointed to the distinction between physical length (that of the tape) and its duration, singling out two different aspects of temporality. In addition, the work included a fourth page in which the numbers of the segments were listed in such a way that the increasing decimal created a longer line in each subsequent row. The result was an overall pyramid shape, echoing Robert Smithson’s A Heap of Language (1966). Highlighting the various outcomes that a description might yield, Piper seemed to be posing a counter argument to Lawrence Wiener’s position (after 1968) that the verbal component of a Conceptual artwork is equal to its physical manifestation. It was precisely its manifestations, even if in writing alone, that made the visual experience in all of Piper’s works distinct from its description. Moreover, though not all of the works in the Concrete Infinity series had been actually carried out, “concrete” did not necessarily reference the execution of the work in real life, as words themselves were also referred to as concrete elements. In Text of a piece for Larry Weiner, for example, the plan and its outcome both appeared as alphanumeric on paper. Some of the works in the series also dealt directly with the concept and practice of seriation. Taped Lecture on Seriation (given November 7, 1968) (1968) was both a discrete work of Conceptual Art and an annotated event score for Seriation #1: Lecture (1968), which exists as a sound-work (Figure 2.16). Taped Lecture on Seriation consisted of several written elements. The first was a description of the procedure that read: A recorded half hour of the daylight savings time announcement available on the telephone. Announcement is interrupted by disconnection at two-minute intervals. Number therefore has to be continually redialed. This operation takes approximately ten seconds to perform–the same length of time needed to make a single announcement, and is recorded as part of lecture [sic]. The half hour recorded should coincide with the time of presentation.

The description was followed by two citations. The first was from George Kubler’s The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962) and explained: “seriation: ‘the analysis of any action into serial components.’ ”49 The second citation was a simple definition of “series” from Webster’s Dictionary. Kubler proposed new ways to consider the history of art as a sequence of “things” rather than as the evolution of style, and his significance for artists of the time cannot be underestimated.50 He introduced an approach that regarded art as one cultural form within others, the focus on objects and not on their makers forming an entirely new conception of progression and progress. Kubler serialised cultural objects into what he called a “form class” in order to

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Adrian Piper, Nineteen Concrete Space-Time-Infinity Pieces: Taped Lecture on Seriation, (given November 7, 1968), 1968. Typescript page. 11 × 8½ in. (27.9 cm × 21.6 cm). © Generali Foundation Collection—Permanent Loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

describe historical processes of artistic development and offer a new method by which the evolution of objects should be understood. Similarly, Piper captured segments in order to understand the way progression itself was perceived. (She later repeated this process in relation to space, variously grouping maps according to different taxonomies, or utilising a method of serialisation also based on Kubler’s structural procedures). While Piper’s citation did not follow academic standards, in that it did not cite Kubler in the context of his remarks but rather recast his words to serve her investigation of seriality as a function of progressing time, her overall attitude towards her practice reflected his influence as well as Duchamp’s use of the found object.51 Like Kubler’s systemsbased approach to the history of things (art and non-art objects alike), which analysed the progression of objects according to a certain “problem” these objects aimed to answer, Piper captured a series from an already existing element in the world. Drawing from Kubler’s structural outlook on how humanity defined the progression of time, Piper also found new ways to reflect on the manner in which the meaning of time comes to be. Following these citations, the third textual element of the piece began with an interpretation of the work’s purpose: The choice of the time announcement was directed toward giving a direct experience of the duration of the half hour. The continuity of the announcement throughout the half hour unifies it as an action performed in time. The primary unit of seriation is ten seconds: the announcements are given at ten second intervals, describe ten seconds of time, and are interrupted by ten seconds of dialing. The half hour is further subdivided by the interruption of the continuity of the announcements by the disconnection. The secondary serial components, then, are alternately two minutes, ten seconds, two minutes, ten seconds, etc.

The work aimed to give a sense of the concept of half an hour. Accompanied by a description of the system devised to make the work, it emphasised both its structural makeshift and the fact that it drew upon a found object. Another example of the influence of LeWittian serialisation, Piper’s system still aimed to eliminate subjectivity from the artistic process without suppressing the work’s implicit content, namely time. In a 1967 essay, LeWitt explained his serial approach: The aim of the artist would not be to instruct the viewer but to give him information. Whether the viewer understands this information is incidental to the artist; he cannot foresee the understanding of all his viewers. He would follow his predetermined premise to its conclusion avoiding subjectivity. Chance, taste, or unconsciously remembered forms would play no part in the outcome. The serial artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloging the results of his premise.52

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If LeWitt’s seriality was a means to produce the work, Piper, as implied by the Kubler citation, used seriality as a means of analysis. Ironically, it was the textual component of this two-part piece that was actually named “Taped Lecture on Seriation” (emphasis added) (1968). This deconstructive gesture reclassified the instructions as action and introduced the format of the lecture as a site for artistic production (a format that reappeared in Piper’s later works such as Funk Lessons (1982–84) or Cornered (1988) and became an important paradigm employed years later by artists such as Walid Raad or Sharon Hayes). The slippage of meaning in the title granted what is essentially a description the fully-fledged status of an artwork. The conflation of a tape—an object—with a description of the procedures for making the artwork equated the object with its verbal substitution. Kotz parsed out the distinctions: It is tempting to decry this logic for its repression of the very historicity and semiotic materiality of language, as in Mel Bochner’s famous 1970 piece Language Is Not Transparent, which perhaps all-too-easily reads as a rejoinder to Kosuth, his former student. Indeed, Kosuth’s work would seem to serve as the template for the kind of Conceptual Art that aims, in Buchloh’s terms, “to replace the object of spatial and perceptual experience by linguistic definition alone.” Yet the interest of such efforts—by Adrian Piper, Robert Barry, LeWitt or Kosuth—is their inevitable failure; to rephrase Hollis Frampton, language is not a substitute for anything.53

While I cite this passage in agreement with Kotz, I believe Piper’s work is an exception to this case, as her use of language functioned comparatively, juxtaposing the many ways in which language can be used, not just by substituting language for form.The analytic part of the work was often applied in imposing boundaries, the act of demarcation becoming a tool for understanding. In the Kubler excerpt quoted by Piper, he underscored the difficulty in the historian’s task as identifying the limits of events chains, in other words, periodisation, as the real intellectual challenge. The logic of demarcating boundaries was seen as always already loaded, such that even systematic descriptions are neither neutral nor transparent, inevitably pointing to measurement as a malleable form for/as art. Thus, while language and time were understood to be theoretically infinite, the Conceptual work pointed to the idea of limits as a way of demarcating meaning, and to how structures enable the human mind to conceptualise something otherwise beyond its capacity. When realised as the discrete sound-work Seriation #1: Lecture (1968; 00:30:00), the work highlighted that the time the audience was hearing declared was not the time recorded. This emphasised that the found object—the original recording—already pointed to the slippage of the concept of time and time itself, and also to the fact that time was only given meaning through its

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

demarcation by language, which was otherwise not identical with the time it was describing. The announcer of the daylight savings service was saying: “at the tone the time will be one o’clock and thirty seconds,” already pointing to the difference between speaking the time and the moment of its occurrence “at the tone.” By isolating this service and pointing to the semiotics of its speech act, Piper highlighted the distance between presence and the idea of presence, between the experience and its representation. Listening teased the non-synchronicity of signifier with the referent. When the announcement: “at the tone the time will be one o’clock, exactly” was played, the non-synchronicity operated on the level of the event itself (the exact time comes with the tone, not when the words about the exact time are spoken), and at any potential point of reception, when the viewer would be listening to a discussion of time different from the actual time they are inhabiting. Time in this work is hence both abstract and specific, separating the idea of time from the measurement of time or an actual sense of duration. The two sides of the sign, the signifier and the referent, are detached, as is the time spoken from its relationship to an actual moment of time. In other words, the distance between the representation of time and the experience of time was put on display, making apparent one effect of time—as a mediated condition of being. In Kosuth’s treatise of Conceptual Art he made the distinction between aesthetics, which, according to him, were based on opinion, and art that existed as tautologies, independent of philosophical presumption and thus constructed as an analytic proposition, which was art that questioned the function of art.54 Having transitioned from using a set of procedures to produce an object to employing sets of criteria as the work itself, Piper’s Nineteen Concrete Space-Time-Infinity Pieces epitomise analytic work. Not necessarily the “strong” conceptualism as meant by Osborne, they instead demonstrated a hybrid of the LeWitt and Kosuth models.55 The work corresponded with LeWitt’s in that the viewer was caught between reading what the work was describing and looking at it; and related to Kosuth’s ideas about the tautological function of a work that both defined and presented itself. From paper to the body: typologies of spatial relations

By 1968, a group of contemporary poets, who also came to consider language as concrete, sought to collaborate with the artists they encountered in the series of language shows at the Dwan gallery.56 The 1969 press release for Language III stated: “One of the emphasis [sic] of the exhibit will be concrete poetry … It is interesting to note that since the last exhibitions works by concrete poets have become more three dimensional, exhibiting a more sculptural frame of reference.”57 The rejection of concrete poetry by the “strong” Conceptualists in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in some of the histories of

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Conceptual Art, can be seen as an impulse to defend disciplinary boundaries, to read the intervention of language into art only in terms of the resistance of the visual, as opposed to including within this paradigm the new tendencies in post-war poetry, where the emphasis on the visual capacity of words came in opposition to its content or ability to reference meaning. As Kotz explained: “Many artists dismissed concrete poetry as deeply pictorial and irrelevant.”58 The significance of Kotz’s approach (and her analysis of art’s relation to concrete poetry) resides in the understanding that some of the most interesting contributions to Conceptual Art came not from within disciplinary boundaries but, quite the contrary, from the destabilisation of their structures and parameters through the interaction with other fields. And there were other directions as well. As Conceptual artists also aimed to find new means to distribute their work and undermine the dominance of galleries and museums, they looked for ways to circulate not only through the broad network of mail-art, but also notably with print periodicals, as well as edition publications, such as William Copley’s six-volume S.M.S. portfolio (that distributed art multiples) or the multimedia magazine Aspen (edited by Brian O’Doherty).59 Piper published in 0 to 9, a magazine of mimeographed editions, active from 1967–69, along with a broad range of artists and writers including: Sol LeWitt, Dan Graham, Ted Berrigan, John Giorno, Clark Coolidge, Michael Heizer, Robert Barry, Les Levine, Robert Smithson, Hannah Weiner, Emmett Williams, Dick Higgins, Yvonne Rainer, Aram Saroyan, Bernar Venet, Alan Sondheim, Rosemary Mayer (Piper’s friend who photographed several of Piper’s performances), and the editors Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer. The title of the publication was based on the number paintings of Jasper Johns, a pioneer in using language as concrete form.60 Piper considered language among other mechanisms of recording that could “capture” ideas. Like Acconci, she extended an attitude to language as a corporal annotative device. Citing Craig Dworkin, Gwen Allen analysed Acconci’s move from working on the page to working with the body on the street, where words and actions became equivalent forces: Acconci’s investigative project was undertaken in a climate of radical semiotic interrogation. Without explicit connection or commentary, artists and poets were creating works that proposed the same theoretical conclusions being simultaneously advanced by poststructural theorists. By considering the work of Acconci, Smithson, and their contemporaries in this context, we can see how the linguistically based arguments and models of those theorists might be translated to a non literary realm.61

For Acconci the shift was from poetry to art, for Piper the use of language was rooted in the principles of minimalism, as she realised work through a predetermined set of instructions. Various attitudes were seen in Piper’s

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

contributions to the later issues of 0 to 9, where she used language to designate a theoretical space as an artwork, employed a schema to generate a work on the page, referred directly to the reader’s process of reading, or combined the above by establishing several grids with various number orders, followed by an exhaustive description of variations on its possible reading sequence.62 Thus language was used in its communicative function, its descriptive capability, and its ability to either refer to something tangible or to generate a conceptual idea. With its scores (including one by Piper) published as a supplement to the last issue of 0 to 9, Street Works I involved three events that took place on March 15, 1969, in New York. This was followed by Street Works II (performed April 18, 1969, between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. on the block between 5th and 6th Avenues and 13th and 14th Streets).63 In his review of the latter for the Village Voice, John Perreault emphasised that several of the organisers had each come separately to the idea of an art show on the streets. Reporting on the group nature of the events, incoherence and open boundaries notwithstanding (for example, Stephen Kaltenbach bringing numerous students to participate unannounced), Perreault explained the intent of the organisers: “instead of taking ‘non-art’ and placing it in an art context we wanted to take art and put it into a non-art context.”64 In preparation for the piece, Piper outlined five proposals, three of which were eventually carried out. One was to distribute copies of the instructions sheet itself; another for Piper to walk around the interior boundaries of the block playing loudly at double speed for one hour the sound recorded a week earlier when walking for two hours around the outer sidewalks surrounding the designated block. Today, the work exists as a sound piece, Streetwork Streettracks I–II (1969; 01:43:28), where one can hear something like a soundportrait of the city, as well as several conversations Piper had with artists and acquaintances (including Richard Van Buren, Ed Ruda, and Acconci), during which we can hear Piper repeatedly explaining to her interlocutors that she is “compressing space and time.” Piper also imparted to her interlocutors that her first solo exhibition, mentioned by Perreault in the Village Voice, was being launched.65 Three Untitled Projects (1969) was a series of mimeographed editions published by 0 to 9 Press and distributed as a mail-art exhibition to a list of addressees titled “Exhibit Locations,” where each recipient’s name was marked by a red dot as a location, signaling that the exhibition’s site would be the moment of its reception.66 An announcement of the show appeared in the Village Voice (March 13, 1969) gallery section simply stating: “ADRIAN PIPER,” and “From March on.” All three projects dealt with the codification of space and scale. One booklet consisted of a description page and a set of standardised, store-bought, graph paper of increasingly smaller scale. The text described the scale of the gridded paper as if each sheet had been reduced from a much

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larger “area,” pretending the graph paper was a map referring to a territory. As if animated by incrementally growing smaller—its represented terrain receding away from the viewer—it positioned the viewer/reader in a different relation to the phenomenon he or she was holding. A revision of landscape painting, where grid devices were used to translate three-dimensional reality by means of linear perspective, it also referenced mapping, a radical twist on these traditional modes of explaining the world. Through Piper’s lattice, like that of George Kubler, the histories of both painting and mapping were leveled as things—equivalent to language and capable of description. In Piper’s work the mode of description itself became the subject. Reorienting the human observer in relation to the notation of space, the series of twenty Hypothesis (1968–70) works is evidence of the transition from a humanist-based perspectival rendition of the world to a postmodern relativist outlook. In these hypothetical mappings, Piper located her body (the human body) within and not outside the picture. Each “map” was collaged with a graph customised to contain the given respective dimensions of the time/space coordinates assembled by locating specific snapshots along a continuum; a sheet detailing the numerical values from which the graph was derived; and a theoretical essay Piper wrote in 1969 outlining the process, parameters, constraints, and reasons that she had imposed in order to produce the work. Letting go of the masterful or overviewing vantage point of traditional perspectival rendition, her charting of her immediate surroundings was relativist rather than absolute. Considering her body as part of the environment, she intermittently held a camera up to her eyes and snapped a shot (with examples including a trip to the grocery store, the interior of her loft, her kitchen table, and an image of a friend working as a secretary in an office). The images were then arranged on a graph, charting their place on a set of space/time coordinates in relation to her body—as another object—in this space/time continuum. Looking at such charts, the viewer no longer looked through the vantage point behind the artist’s eyes, but was rather shown a field where every point of view was hypothetical. This was a new kind of objectivity that recognised the relativity of mediated information and point of view, in contrast with the certitude of the masterful enlightenment-age subject. In it facts were still facts, although their analysis and outcome were relative and therefore hypothetical. This approach persisted in Piper’s subsequent street works, where her main medium was the body, a body distinct from the subject inhabiting it and mapped in language. From Conceptual Art to conceptualism: art as catalytic agent, after 1970

Around 1970 Piper increased her use of her body, at the same time that she committed herself to a full-time study of philosophy, in order to learn the

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

history of the ideas with which she was engaged. Written shortly after their making, In “Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object,” a work that, as John Bowles has shown, blurred the distinction between writing and artwork, Piper described a series of recent performances.67 A detailed summation of and reflection on Catalysis (1970–73) and subsequent clandestine work, “Talking to Myself ” clarified how Piper’s turn to the body aimed to substitute the need for a discrete object that could always only refer to an isolated art context or frameworks that, for Piper, mediated the potential for the viewer to have an immediate transformative experience.68 Catalysis activated a powerful catalytic agent, as Piper casually engaged in irregular behavior or offensive appearance within the urban environment. Introducing her body as an art object may be compared with the way On Kawara employed the term “I” to refer to the figure of the artist (as opposed to his personal sense of self).69 Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City (1970) was intended by Piper to disrupt the unity between her experience of self and the intellectual registration of it. To isolate herself from external influence, Piper appeared in a sensory-deprivation outfit, wearing elbow-high leather gloves, a large black sleeping mask, and nose and earplugs. Together with the few existing photographs of Catalysis (1970–73), this work has become emblematic of her practice since its documentation by Rosemary Mayer was exhibited in Piper’s 1987 retrospective at the Alternative Museum in New York. In 1981, Piper reflected on her intentions for Catalysis to isolate her sense of self from the abundance of self-consciousness that characterised Max’s—a favorite haunt of artists—environment. Looking back, she realised how her “objectlike passivity” became “an independent presence confronting the Art-Conscious environment with autonomy. My objecthood became my subjecthood.”70 As in Meat into Meat (1968), once the human variable was introduced, intentions differed from outcomes. Nevertheless, the principle remained that the body was introduced as one component within the matrix of elements that constituted art. The consideration of the artist’s body as a factor within the field was in many ways equivalent to how writing related to the field of the page in the previous work—one element within several whose status merited investigation. Here, Piper scrutinised the context of artmaking (beyond the studio), display (beyond the museum), and circulation (beyond the gallery), and challenged the primacy of the object (rather than the many elements surrounding it), aligning her first enquiries with the context of artmaking and the primacy of the object, and only then with her social position as a gendered and racialised subject. If the turn to the body would later draw out its specificity, the politics of the economy of the art object were still emanating from the form, and the context in which the work appeared was still located in the structure, not the referent. In other words, Piper’s objectification of the body

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leveled its capacity for meaning with the other elements such that it would be read rather than viewed. In the turn from Conceptual Art to conceptualism, the text was still of primary concern, introducing the body as a mode of inscription. And thus, although the process still relied on a schema à la Sol LeWitt, the work also came closer to that of Vito Acconci, whose performance in the same event consisted of sitting at one of the tables and for the entire hour rubbing his arm until it was bruised—i.e. inscribed.71 Characterising Piper’s piece as a “startling image,” Perreault reported: “Ira Joel Haber announced that he had turned Adrian Piper into an illustration because at one point when she was stumbling around—quite beautifully—the sound to her sight, via juke box, was The Who’s ‘Touch Me’ from ‘Tommy.’”72 Piper’s sensory deprivation and the figure of the deaf/dumb/mute Tommy represent two counter-cultural attitudes concerned with the internal/external dynamics of consciousness. As Piper became better known, the Catalysis works that had been photographed by Rosemary Mayer were circulated, including those of her riding a bus with a towel stuffed in her mouth or wearing a shirt dipped in paint and a sign on her body stating “Wet Paint.” For understandable reasons, it is these that have been most subject to the attention of historians and curators. However, they are but a few examples from a vast body of work whose primary focus was not the body, but the idea of narrowing the gap between the conception of a piece and its final form. In “Talking to Myself ” Piper walked her reader through a whole set of subsequent performances. She made it evident that her use of her body did not indicate a psychological preoccupation with subjective experience, but a concern with art world politics in relation to her work’s reception. In (6), the problem has become that of the balance between self and other within a single—my own—consciousness. Formerly the problem was that of solipsism, the balance between my own consciousness and a problematic external world. That seems to have resolved itself by the possibility of assimilating as much of that external world, as other, into my sense of myself. The more I assimilate, the more easily I am able to see myself as “an object in the world among others.”73

“Talking to Myself ” documented many performances that were implemented privately or unannounced, repeated several times, and went unrecorded save by description. They were on-going experiments with the principles of separating and reassembling the self, the art object, the audience, and the art (or non-art) context. As in her early work, these later works were always planned in advance and then carried out, enabling Piper to detach her self from her shy personality and to perform absurd or disturbing activities in public. The ability to perform these actions on the self was established by, and subsequent to, the

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minimalist/Conceptualist method of following a schema to produce a work. The attempt to erode the self within the artwork was akin to how Conceptual Art subverted the unity of the modernist artwork and artist, or where the work began or ended. Piper’s body of performance works can be seen to exist in the condition of “Text,” addressed earlier in the chapter. This is not because they remain mostly in written documentation and as a few photographs, but because, like Roland Barthes’ notion of Text, they have neither subject matter begging analysis nor an encoded secret meaning to be uncovered. There is no one correct interpretation. Instead, her performances reveal gaps where they were invisible before, between the self of the artist and the self of the performer at the moment of performance, between the latter and her ability to observe herself simultaneously as audience of her own performance. Every attempt to pin down the meaning of the work endlessly defers its site and further erodes the distinction between artist, art-object, actual work, documentation, reception, and circulation. In many ways the text “Talking to Myself ” echoes Piper’s earlier arithmetic works, as she systematically wrote her way through a thorough set of permutations regarding the distinctions between subject/object or production/reception (the self as object, the self as other, and so on), exhausting every possible permutation. Indeed, Piper’s awareness of the potentially infinite perspectives, and of the fact that this work will function upon reception, was so strong that she incorporated into her text empty lines with a call for the reader to list other possibilities that the potential viewer/reader may come up with. Following from Conceptual Art’s initial rejection of art’s commodity status as well as the elimination of the critic as interlocutor (the latter emphasised by Barthes roughly in the same period), these works had no discrete object, allowing, as in Barthes’ analysis, for the work as Text to be everywhere, to become upon its moment of reception, made by the artist and her interlocutor at once. This position was strengthened by Piper’s on-going attempts to configure her place in the work as both maker and receiver, identifying the manifold ways in which their roles could be isolated and reconfigured. Remarkable about Catalysis (1970–73), and affirming its status as Text, is the tremendous degree of influence that this work has had on contemporary art, despite the fact that the performances, in effect, have been seen by a select few. Her seeming return to subjectivity in the later work was not in the sense of the personal, but rather to subjectivity as a case study in class, gender, and race, interaction. The Mythic Being (1973–75), activated a character of “a third-world, working class, overtly hostile male.”74 With the series Political Self Portraits (1978–80), followed by pieces such as Cornered (1988), My Calling (Card) #1 and #2 (1986–90), Funk Lessons (1982–84), and A Tale of Avarice and Poverty (1985), to name key examples, Piper began to refer directly and

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specifically to her personal past, biography, and identity. Read as case studies rather than confessions or expressions, these works also align with Barthes’ theory, and can be considered as Texts: It is not that the Author may not “come back” in the Text, in his text, but he then does so as a “guest.” If he is a novelist, he is inscribed in the novel like one of his characters, figured in the carpet; no longer privileged, paternal, aletheological, his inscription is ludic. He becomes as it were, a paper-author: his life no longer the origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to his work; there is a reversion of the work onto the life (and no longer the contrary); it is the work of Proust, of Genet which allows their lives to be read as a text. The word “bio-graphy” re-acquires a strong etymological sense, at the same time as the sincerity of the enunciation—veritable “cross” borne by literary morality—becomes a false problem: the I which writes the text, it too, is never more than a paper-I.75

The need to isolate the subject from identity and from the self is driven to its limits in a previously unpublished performance titled the Spingarn Tapes, 2/1972 (1972), a recorded dialogue between Piper and the psychologist Dr Jim Spingarn. Briefly described in “Talking to Myself,” the full transcription of their conversations sheds light on several aspects of Piper’s practice in the context of the Duchampian redefinitions of art and its boundaries.76 Piper mentioned Marcel Duchamp to Spingarn as the given paradigm of that moment. She then explained that she rejects the notion of collapsing art and life, propagated by the milieu of John Cage and other Duchampian inheritors. It was precisely because her work was performed in such proximity to “life” that she wanted to draw the distinction between what was art and what was non-art. It was not the immanent or mundane aspects of art in the art/life paradigm that Piper rejected, but rather the inherent risk of psychologising the process of artmaking. She went on to explain how working with “documentation and Conceptual forms” came from her commitment to remove subjectivity and expression from the work of art. Spingarn seemed sympathetic to her attempt to ensure that her art had no other function in her life beyond its status as an aesthetic investigation. Taking the experiment seriously, he complemented her on the consistency in her use of terms. Piper explained to Spingarn her artistic development in the context of her life story, and how her education as a scholarship student in an elite private school in New York made her aware of the “mutually dependent” conditions of race and class. The combination of observing personal difficulties deriving from socially imposed situations and conditions, and reading feminist literature drove her to perform Catalysis (1970–73). Iterations were conceived as extensions of previously unresolved interactions, such that she would, for example, enact a resolution of a dispute before an unknowing clerk at the

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

post office counter or supermarket line. The goal of the performance was simultaneously to be in the state of a pedestrian shopper, rehearsing a scene from her recent past, and enacting an extension of that scene, while attempting to register the event by observing her self as other. She explained the distinction between the philosophical and the psychological outlook on the separation of subject and object (the self as other): Now I think that in order to arrive at any kind of philosophical insight it is quite [im]possible to divorce psychology from it. I think that when you think about things objectively you bring everything that you are to bear on the problem. You don’t divorce yourself and consider things in purely abstract terms. You involve yourself. You commit yourself to understanding what is going on in virtue of what you are. Kant said something like that. Alright. Subject and object are mutually dependent.77

Dealing with materials drawn from life, the works in Catalysis (1970–73) were a philosophical reflection on the relation of art and life, and not a psychological collapse of one into the other. The work was an insistence on the subject’s imbrication with the work. This subject was the subject of philosophy, not the existential or expressive subject of modernism. Piper’s was a subject self— conscious of internal fragmentation and serving to highlight the contradictions of existence for the purpose of study and understanding. The Spingarn Tapes are and are not all of the following: therapy sessions, performance, a work of art, a work of writing, and as such they, like other works in this series of performances, are Text. When, in one instance Spingarn asked why Piper could not simply “perform” the work for him rather than describe it, she attempts to explain: Piper: “I can’t present the finished work in a receptive situation.” Spingarn: “Because the situation is wrong for it because you are doing it for me and I know you are doing a piece.” Piper: “and not only that but there is something else. One of the major things that differentiates my work as art from just any personal activity or antic is the fact that when I do it I become to myself an audience. There is a kind of self consciousness involved in what I am doing that creates a kind of inner split between what I am actually involved in and the fact that I am perceiving myself doing it and when.”78

Ultimately however, Spingarn criticised Piper’s goal to detach her subjectivity from her self, accusing her of voiding her humanity. Yet, Piper was not voiding her humanity but rather her identity, undoing the unity between her experience of self and the intellectual registration of it. She temporarily suspended her identification with herself in order to use the self as an object in the experiment.

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When describing her psychological disposition, she mentioned her ability to objectify her feelings and personal situation to “make of them abstract theoretical subjects for discussion.”79 On the one hand, this kind of experimentation with consciousness and self-consciousness was very much in line with the spirit of the period, with the introduction of transcendental meditation in the West and the alternate-consciousness experiments of Timothy Leary, as well as the poststructuralist philosophy of the time in which the humanist assumptions of a unified self were being refuted. On the other hand, Piper’s means were distinct. They followed precisely from the attempts of Conceptual Art to void the work of subjectivity, then, through her focus on the semiotic mediation of language, took a different tack into analysing the mediating power of concepts such as “other” and “self.” It also, of course, fits with many other characteristics of Conceptual Art, rejecting the object and its traditional economy and circulation, as well as following a predetermined schema. Piper consulted Spingarn in order to verify that her art, which had no function other than an aesthetic investigation into the life of the artist, was not fulfilling for her the function of therapy. As such, her work demarcated the boundaries of art and essentially questioned what art is, still reflecting elements from Kosuth’s “analytic proposition,” and also aligned with his insistence that art not “perform” a task. However, Piper’s use of the term “aesthetic” is different than that of Kosuth in his “Art After Philosophy,” where he uses aesthetics interchangeably with formalism. Piper’s discussion in the Spingarn Tapes designated aesthetics as a philosophical investigation on the nature of art, not as a term that refers to the beauty of forms or the judgement of sensual experiences. However, given the Spingarn Tapes’ relation to a wider field of practice, it was not Conceptual per se, but rather conceptual, as it already expanded towards a broader set of performative practice and brought the question of subjectivity, as subject matter, into the fold. Conclusion: after conceptualism, the body as textual schema

The attempt to exclude subjectivity from the making of the work was concurrent with the movement in philosophy first towards structural analysis, which “mapped” human actors in the world, and later towards poststructuralist analysis, which further unpacked second-order mediation (the ideology embedded in language, mapping, recording, communication, and all other elements that channel and shape human perception into meaning). It was first an abstract investigation, into which the particular, the gendered, racialised, and classed subject was later introduced by artists of the 1970s, not as markers of self, but as social constructions meriting analysis. The preoccupation with the condition of text as a mediator runs throughout Piper’s oeuvre. Starting with her early drawings, Piper tested the relation of writing to drawing, of the schema to the

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

dimensional world, and of the notational system to time-based consciousness. As Kotz has analysed, artists that had identified the linguistic foundation of minimalism had extended its logic to other types of representation and demonstrated the equivalence of photography, texts, and objects by subjecting them to analogous processes. “This turn to language,” she argued, “occurs alongside a pervasive logic structuring 1960s’ artistic production, in which a ‘general’ template or idea potentially generates multiple ‘specific’ realizations— whether these take the form of performed act, sculptural objects, or linguistic statement.”80 Piper’s preoccupations with the universal questions of time and space were initially addressed within this logic, as she carried out works from a general schema and/or carried out a performance realised from a textual set of directions. Subsequently, this strategy evolved into a focus on the particular that had arrived with the shift from the general use of the body to its specific classed, gendered, and racialised identity. It was as such not an assertion of personal identity, but rather of conditions to be observed as social impositions, the sites where inequality and oppression manifested. Unannounced street works were central to Piper’s practice and the understanding of her oeuvre. But while such well-known series as the Mythic Being (1973–75) performances were overtly about race, class, and gender, the attitude towards these subject matters was born from an analysis of the artistic process and the way in which artistic authorship related to the reception of the final art product.81 These questions were rooted in the concerns of Conceptual Art, which expanded into conceptualism because of ways Conceptual concerns became applicable to thinking about political issues. Piper’s works in which the body of the artist was incorporated used the body as a surrogate for the artistic process, in a manner no different than the incorporation of the schema into the final product of the minimalist/Conceptual program. Notes 1 Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 156. 2 Many of Piper’s excellent champions wrote nuanced and sophisticated analyses of her work. My understanding of her complex body of work is indebted to: Maurice Berger, “Black Skin, White Masks: Adrian Piper and the Politics of Viewing,” in How Art Becomes History (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 93–113, and Maurice Berger and Dara Meyers-Kingsley, eds., Adrian Piper: A Retrospective (Baltimore: University of Maryland, Baltimore County Press, 1999); Jane Farver, Adrian Piper: Reflections 1967–1987 (New York: Alternative Museum, 1987); Elizabeth Hayt-Atkins, “The Indexical Present: A Conversation with Adrian Piper,” Arts Magazine, March 1991, 48–51; Kobena Mercer, “Adrian Piper, 1970–1975: Exiled on Main Street,” in Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers, ed. Kobena Mercer (London: Institute of Visual

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Arts; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 146–165; Judith Wilson, “ ‘In Memory of the News and of Ourselves’: The Art of Adrian Piper,” Third Text 16–17 (Autumn/ Winter 1991): 39–64. 3 John Bowles, Adrian Piper: Gender, Race, and Embodiment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). Bowles’s rigorously researched and excellent monograph positioned Piper’s work within its socio-political context, but regarded her critical intervention into Conceptual Art only from her position of otherness. This led him to identify a discrepancy between Piper’s two phases, as if political awakening—based in the experience of racism and the growing upheaval of the late 1960s—charged her otherwise a-political formal and Conceptual work with content. I propose instead that she repurposed the content addressed in her abstract approach into overt political subject matter. As Bowles set to affirm Piper’s position as a black feminist, he focused more on her later projects while labouring to reconcile what he saw as contradictions in her early practice. 4 For a comprehensive list of Piper’s exhibitions and publications see her CV published on her website. 5 As Piper clarified: “I regard earlier conceptual concerns as incorporated into later ones, rather than repudiated.” See Adrian Piper, “Introduction: Some Very FORWARD Remarks,” in Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume I: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968–1992 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), xxix–xxxx. I bring her words here not as “proof,” that this is the correct way to read the work, but rather as additional verification. 6 How broad the impact of Conceptual Art is can be gauged by its recognition in mainstream art journalism. Roberta Smith writes: “It also reflects the continuing hegemony of late-late Conceptualism—now extravagantly materialized and laborintensive—over the international exhibition circuit,” in “Art Show as Unruly Organism: Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany,” New York Times, June 14, 2012, or Christopher Knight’s, “MOCA’s ‘Art in the Streets’ Gets the Big Picture Wrong,” Los Angeles Times, May 29, 2011, where he underscores: “Since the 1970s, however, the deepest impact on art culture has come from Conceptual art … Conceptualism is the primary lingua franca of art today—like it or not, and for good or ill.” 7 “Pure” Conceptual Art is the focus of the second part of Joseph Kosuth’s foundational article “Art after Philosophy” (where he defines Adrian Piper as one of the “purer” Conceptual artists), as well as a concern in the work and writing of the Art & Language group. See Joseph Kosuth “Art after Philosophy, part II,” Studio International 178, no. 916 (November 1969): 160. The diverse positions of the members and affiliates of the Art & Language group can be seen in their publication Art-Language, published in the United Kingdom from 1969 until 1985, with editors including Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin, Harold Hurrell and Joseph Kosuth (listed as American editor), working later with Charles Harrison, Mel Ramsden, Ian Burn, Michael Corris, Terry Smith, and Paul Wood. 8 Significant in the United States are: Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Ursula Meyer, ed., Conceptual Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), and Gregory Battcock, ed., Idea Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1973). Exhibitions

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included projects curated by Seth Siegelaub between 1968 and 1970; Software: Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art, curated by Jack Burnham at the Jewish Museum, New York, 1970; Information by Kynaston McShine at the Museum of Modern Art, 1970; Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects, by Donald Karshan and Joseph Kosuth at the New York Cultural Center, 1970. 9 Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 155–164. Although Craig Owens does not specifically cite “From Work to Text,” and is focused more on “Death of the Author,” my reading of the shift from the modern to the postmodern is influenced by Craig Owens, “From Work to Frame, or, Is There Life After ‘The Death of the Author’?” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 122–139. 10 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972). 11 Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author,” Aspen 5–6: The Minimalism Issue (Fall/ Winter 1967), www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/index.html. No page numbers indicated. 12 Barthes considered the major shifts of the twentieth century to be the Marxist and Freudian ones, characterising the subsequent changes not as breaks, but as “epistemological slide[s]” or “a certain mutation.” Whatever the character of change or the disciplinary nuances may be, all the significant theories of the twentieth century had to reckon with forces of mediation, be they language, memory, or currency. From Edmund Husserl to Jacques Derrida or from Freud to Jacques Lacan, the focus of phenomenology and psychoanalysis was on their realisation that truth and meaning are transmitted through conduits that influence their outcome. Of course materialist perspectives from Marx to Althusser also focused on the mediating power of economy and ideology. 13 Simone de Beauvoir’s quip that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” demonstrates the understanding that concepts are not intrinsic, inherent, or fixed, but are rather created of pre-conditions that can be isolated and analysed, and that these new understandings (for example that race is a construction rather than biological essence) can be politically mobilised. In The Second Sex (1949), trans. and ed. H.M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 267. 14 Peter Osborne, “Conceptual Art and/as Philosophy”, in Rewriting Conceptual Art, eds. Michael Newman and Jon Bird (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 50. Osborne’s term “regulative fantasy” seems to rely on Kant’s distinction between “constitutive” and “regulative” judgements, the first being purely theoretical and the latter needing further verification. See Robert Hanna, “Kant’s Theory of Judgment,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/kant-judgment. 15 Osborne, “Conceptual Art and/as Philosophy,” 54–56. 16 Osborne, “Conceptual Art and/as Philosophy,” 58. 17 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” (1960) in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 85–93. 18 Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 79–83.

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19 This argument is made by Benjamin Buchloh, in “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 105–143. 20 Barthes highlights interdisciplinarity as a characteristic of the shift from work to text. With disciplinarity being a modern trait, the real transformation began to occur when new kinds of objects and languages denied classification simply by bringing together disciplines to break down their unity. 21 I use minimalism as a characteristic and not a proper name because, as opposed to Conceptual Art, the artists working in this mode mostly did not define themselves as such. 22 For a description of the timeline of her introduction into contemporaneous practices see Adrian Piper, “My Art Education (1968),” in Out of Order, Out of Sight, 3–8. 23 An additional series done roughly around the time was named Space Paintings or Constructions I. These works challenged the two-dimensionality of painting by attempting to render space not through illusionistic perspective. I focus on Constructions II, in which individual works are named Untitled Construction, as it marks the beginning of Piper’s mature practice. 24 Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965): 74–82. 25 According to Claudia Barrow Nine-Part Floating Square (1967) extended Piper’s concerns in Drawings About Paper and Writing About Words (1967), where Piper first activated the tension between the materiality of the paper as an object and the two-dimensionality of its prefabricated grid. “Influenced by the work of Agnes Martin, Piper pushes this paradoxical tension between two-and three-dimensionality, abstract representation and concrete physicality even further in Nine Part Floating Square.” See Claudia Barrow, “Adrian Piper: Space, Time and Reference 1967–1970,” in Adrian Piper (Birmingham, U.K.; Manchester: Ikon Gallery, 1991), 12. 26 Piper met Duchamp when he visited the School of Visual Arts, circa 1968. 27 Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969,” 108. This is not to gloss over the differences between the two historians, but rather to tease out the similar core in their disciplinary approach. 28 Of course LeWitt’s and Piper’s practices shared just as many characteristics with Douglas Huebler, On Kawara, or Hanne Darboven. For serial art as an antisubjectivity strategy see Anne Rorimer, “Systems, Seriality, Sequence,” in New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 154–193. 29 Charles Harrison, Essays on Art and Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 47. Harrison’s book was first published in the United Kingdom in 1991. Intent on distinguishing between American conceptualism as an extension of a “postminimal” avant-garde and a true critical conceptualism as a mostly European endeavor (save a few artists such as Kosuth or On Kawara), Harrison based his definition of Conceptual Art on the group Art & Language, with which he was affiliated. While his historical analysis is accurate and strong and his claims for Art & Language legitimate, his evaluation of other clusters of Conceptual Art seem, at the very least, to lack objectivity: “It appeared that the Minimal intervention had provoked a kind of explosion of the ontological limits of art. These limits were conceived by different persons in different ways, according to the sociological,

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historical and cultural determinates upon learning and imagination. What was supposed to follow from the relaxation of limits was consequently subject to a wide range of different interpretations. A distinctly “Californian” variety of Conceptual Art distilled the ethos of a wistfully agnostic hippiedom, while in New York artist-artisans crossed Dematerialisation with the ready-made or with systems theory or with concrete poetry and were transformed into artist-intellectuals or McLuhanite savants or neo-Dada mystics.” Harrison, Essays on Art and Language, 46–47. Taking my cue from the ways in which Michael Fried’s negative characterisation of minimalism has been used as a foundational text for understanding its contribution, I use Harrison’s analysis against the grain of his value judgement. I contend instead that it is precisely in the “explosion of the ontological limits of art,” that we find the useful criteria for evaluating the development of a more general conceptualism. Alexander Alberro also addresses this bias in Harrison. See Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 199. 30 Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969,” 107. 31 Craig Owens, “Earthwords,” in Beyond Recognition, 40–51. Placing Smithson in the context of the minimalists, Owens highlights the significance of language to both practices. 32 In her essay, Krauss identified how, like that of myth, the function of the grid is to suspend the conflict between two contradictory world-views. In the case of modernist abstraction, the conflict is between spiritual content and scientific values. Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (Summer 1979): 51–64. 33 Rosalind Krauss, “Sol LeWitt, Dwan Gallery,” Artforum 6 (April 1968): 57. After reading this review Piper wrote LeWitt a letter of encouragement, after which they met in person and remained life-long friends. 34 Although Conceptual artists did not elaborate upon these distinctions, Alberro identified a latent break in the temporal aspect of their pronounced division of their process into its conception, production, and reception. See Alexander Alberro, “Time and Conceptual Art,” in Tempus Fugit: Time Flies, ed. Jan Schall (Kansas City: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2000), 144–157. 35 Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969,” 113. 36 The idea that Conceptual Art made minimalism’s proposition explicit is suggested by Kosuth, in “1975,” The Fox 2 (1975): 90–91. 37 For Fried, theatricality—the perception of an object in time—contradicted the present-ness off the modern artwork, which assured its autonomy as a self-critical object and its independence (from the viewer) for its being and meaning. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5 (June 1967): 12–23. 38 Fried’s was a transcendental presence as “grace.” Piper’s was a presence of mind, more akin to Eastern philosophies. Piper’s interdisciplinary attitude to work was also influenced by non-Western ways of conceptualising time that were circulating in the 1960s in the United States. There was no contradiction between Piper’s later notion of the indexical present—facing things as they appear in the immediate present—and the conceptualisation of the infinite divisibility of things. Adrian Piper, “Xenophobia and the Indexical Present II: Lecture,” in Place Position Presentation Public, ed. Ine Gevers (Den Haag: Jan Van Eyck Akademie, 1993), 24, 136–157.

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39 Pamela Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 77. 40 Jack Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” Artforum 7 (September 1968): 32. Also see Edward A. Shanken, “The House That Jack Built: Jack Burnham’s Concept of Software as a Metaphor for Art,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 6, no. 10 (November 1998), http:// mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/ARTICLES/jack.html. 41 Luke Skrebowski, “Systems, Contexts, Relations: An Alternative Genealogy of Conceptual Art” (PhD diss., Middlesex University, 2009), x–xi. http:// eprints.mdx.ac.uk/6229/1/Skrebowski–systems%2C_contexts%2C_relations.pdf. Skrebowski offers a persuasive conceptualist genealogy, where he addresses key differences between the US and UK branches of Conceptual Art. 42 Adrian Piper, “Meat into Meat,” in Out of Order, Out of Sight, 9. 43 To see a description and a reproduction of the letter in progress, Adrian Piper, “Space, Time, Language, Form (1968),” in Out of Order, Out of Sight, 12. 44 Adrian Piper, “Letter to Terry Atkinson (1969),” in Out of Order, Out of Sight, 15. 45 The works in Nineteen Concrete Space-Time-Infinity Pieces (1968–69) were originally created as separate pieces and later stored in loose-leaf notebooks according to their conceptual relations. With Piper’s first retrospective in 1987 they were exhibited in the folders under this grouping. In contrast, works such as Proposal for Dugway Proving Grounds (1968), Relocated Planes (1969), and Untitled Map/Circle (1969) were created as notebooks at the outset; others, especially those containing visual elements, were initially collected in folders because of financial constraints, with the aim of exhibiting them in frames later. Email correspondence with Sabine Breitweiser, November 22, 2002, Park Place, The Gallery of Art Research, Inc. records; Paula Cooper Gallery records, 1961–2006: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 46 Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 10. 47 But while many Conceptual artists denied the influence of Fluxus, Piper was much more open in her definition of her own practice, and has definitely credited music and dance practitioners, such as Steve Reich and Yvonne Rainer, as influences. All these artists had complex relations to the event score and its use of language, and did not accept words as a friction-less vehicle for communication. 48 All the works from Nineteen Concrete Space-Time-Infinity Pieces (1968–69) can be seen on the website of the Generali Foundation: http://foundation.generali.at/en/ collection/artist/piper-adrian.html#work=3652&artist=328. 49 George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 79. 50 For an analysis of the relation between The Shape of Time, information theory, and cybernetics through the work of Robert Smithson, see Pamela Lee, “ ‘Ultramoderne’: Or, How George Kubler Stole the Time in Sixties Art,” Grey Room 2 (Winter 2001): 46–77. For the methodological significance of Kubler, see Richard Cándida-Smith, “The Other Side of Meaning: George Kubler on the Object as Historical Source,” Intellectual History Newsletter 23 (2001): 85–95.

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

51 I am not suggesting that her citation was infelicitous to Kubler’s work. Accurate citation was not even the issue here, as this was more of a gesture of general reference and statement of affinity. Of note is that many years later Piper would teach a course comparing Kubler to Thomas Khun, whose equivalent contribution in the field of sciences became far more well-known. 52 Sol LeWitt, “Serial Project #1, 1966,”Aspen 5–6: The Minimalism Issue (June 1967), www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/serialProject.html. 53 Kotz, Words to Be Looked At, 186–188. 54 Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy,” Studio International 178, no. 915 (October 1969): 136. 55 In fact, Alberro makes a strong argument that the LeWitt and Kosuth models are not so distinct. Alexander Alberro, “Art as Idea,” in Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, 26–54. 56 Virginia Dawn Gallery mounted four language shows, beginning with Language to be Looked at and Things to be Read in 1967, curated by Robert Smithson (together with Sol LeWitt) and ending in 1970, with Piper included in the last two. 57 Press Release, May 17, 1969, Dwan Gallery records, 1959—circa 1982. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 58 Kotz, Words to Be Looked At, 293. Also see Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy,” 136. For a view on the contribution of writers to art that uses Dan Graham’s Schema (1968) as a paradigmatic example, see Alexander Alberro, “Reductivism in Reverse,” in Tracing Cultures: Art History, Criticism, Critical Fictions (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art: 1994), 7–24. 59 For the interaction of a mail-art scene with underground music, fanzines, and other subcultural phenomena see C. Ondine Chavoya, “Art and Life: Dreva/Gronk,” and “Ray Johnson and Asco: Correspondence,” in Asco: Elite of the Obscure, eds. C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzales (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), 284–299, 300–307. For a rigorous examination of art magazines in the 1960s and 1970s, see Gwen Allen, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 60 Gwen Allen, “Art On and Off the Page: 0 to 9, 1967–1969,” in Artists’ Magazines, 69–89. 61 Craig Douglas Dworkin, “Fugitive Signs,” October 95 (Winter 2001): 103. 62 Adrian Piper, “Untitled,” 0 to 9 no. 5 (January, 1968), reprinted in 0 to 9, eds. Vito Acconci et al. (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1970), 49; “Untitled,” 0 to 9 no. 5 (December, 1968), reprinted in 0 to 9, eds. Acconci et al., 50–52: and “Untitled,” 0 to 9 no. 6 (July, 1969), reprinted in 0 to 9, eds. Acconci et al., 105–109. 63 The first event was organised by Hannah Weiner, Marjorie Strider, and John Perreault, the second also by Vito Acconci, Eduardo Costa, and Bernadette Mayer. Street Works flyer, 1969; 0 to 9 Archive; MSS 26; box 1; folder 50; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. Street Works II flyer, 1969; Kynaston McShine Information Exhibition Research, [II.14]. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 64 Highlighting the atmosphere of possibility fostered by the rise of organisations such as the Art Workers’ Coalition, Perreault briefly described Piper’s performance. See

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John Perreault, “Free Art,” The Village Voice, May 1, 1969, 14. From the collection of the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 65 John Perreault, “On the Street,” The Village Voice, March 27, 1969, 17. 66 An example exists in Lawrence Alloway papers, 1935–2003, Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Accession no. 2003.M.46; Box 13, folder 6; and Harald Szeemann papers, Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Accession no. 2011.M.30; Box 1529, folder 8. The list consisted of artists, critics, and personae connected to the Conceptual Art circuit primarily in the United States, but also in Europe and Canada. Piper submitted all three booklets to be copyrighted as books in the Library of Congress. Certificates for the registration of a claim to copyright are held at the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation (APRAF). File 2. 67 Bowles meticulously tracked the various permutations of the piece and the multiple contexts in which it has been exhibited and published. John Bowles, “Catalysis: Feminist Art and Experience,” in Adrian Piper: Gender, Race, and Embodiment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011): 162–204. 68 Adrian Piper, “Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object,” in Out of Order, Out of Sight, 29–54. 69 In 1970, Piper was a recipient of a series of postcards from Kawara’s on-going mail-art project I Woke Up At …, in which Kawara announced the time of his rising each day. 70 Adrian Piper, “Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City (1970),” in Out of Order, Out of Sight, 27. 71 My reading of Acconci is indebted to Amelia Jones, “The Body in Action: Vito Acconci and the ‘Coherent’ Male Artistic Subject,” in Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 103–150. 72 John Perreault, “Only a Dummy,” The Village Voice, May 14, 1970, 16. The event Saturday Afternoon Show, at the famous art hangout bar Max’s Kansas City, was organised by Hannah Weiner. 73 Piper, “Talking To Myself,” 51. 74 Adrian Piper, “The Mythic Being: Getting Back (1975),” in Out of Order, Out of Sight, 147. For an excellent analysis see Cherise Smith, Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 75 Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 161. 76 Piper, Adrian, in dialogue with Dr Jim Spingarn, dated February 11, 1972 and February 25, 1972, transcripts, APRFA (Tape #2 is undated). 77 Transcripts, tape 3, side 2, 11–12. 78 Transcripts, tape 2, side 2, 4. 79 Transcripts, tape 3 side 1, 12. 80 Kotz, Words to Be Looked At, 175–176. 81 Piper is very clear about this in her extensive writing and analysis of the series in several essays in Out of Order, Out of Sight. Also see my analysis of her The Mythic Being: Getting Back (1975) in “Critical Identity Politics,” X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly 11, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 4–15.

The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

What began in the mid-sixties as an analysis of the context of specific objects (or propositions) and correspondingly the questions of function, has forced us now, ten years later, to focus our attentions on the society and/or culture in which that specific object operates. Our “radicalization” has, rather coldbloodedly, evolved from our work. (Joseph Kosuth (1975))1 There was the formation of the Art Workers’ Coalition as well as the Leftish (albeit simple-mindedly so) aspirations of some of what has come to be known as Conceptual Art—that is, before Conceptual Art began to dance along with “narrative art,” “body art” and other movements in the pseudo-pluralistic spectacle of the Seventies. (Mel Ramsden (1975))2

In his article “1975,” from which the above quote is taken, Joseph Kosuth described the radicalisation process of this circuit, and the expansion of attitudes towards artmaking that until the 1970s had operated within the parameters of the discipline, in dialogue with the art movements that preceded them. Conceptual artists made the definition of art the subject of their work in order to examine how art was demarcated by its place within a broad system generated by the context of display, interpretation, and the philosophy of meaning. Throughout the 1970s conceptualists expanded their dialogue with a modernist avant-garde to contending with issues that have come out of Civil Rights or the protest of the Vietnam War, in response to the challenges marginalised groups posed to a discriminatory museum and gallery system and their criteria. Artists moved from a focus on a dialogue with formalism onto political subject matter, and from an analytic art concerned with abstractions to synthetic preoccupations with the world outside of art. But this was not always well received. In his “On Practice,” also published in 1975, Mel Ramsden criticised the milieu that had developed out of Conceptual Art, challenging several of the strands within it that in his view had expanded the core questions of artistic practice beyond art’s critical criteria. But the expansion criticised by Ramsden, and which this chapter will describe, was not unique to art, but rather echoed a broader shift in the

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humanities and social sciences to interdisciplinary thinking. It followed the revelation earlier in the twentieth century that power and human relations are all mediated by equivalent systems of communication, itself based on a foundation of structuralist analysis. Across disciplines scholars and practitioners elaborated upon the work of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Ferdinand de Saussure, while questioning their own use of method and how mediation impacts the content and reception of all messaging and communications. Conceptualist strategies were no exception. As Eve Meltzer showed: “just like conceptual artists, structuralist theorists—Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the most memorable names among them—looked to systems and language for a revolution in signifying structures.”3 Conceptual Art’s transformation into a broad interdisciplinary conceptualism was also manifested in the turn from the analytic to the synthetic. This expansion was not a negation, but rather it mostly carried over the strategies of its analytic predecessor as an act of homage, a correction by critique. In what ways was classic Conceptual Art a form of political art? For early Conceptual artists the political act was located in questioning modernist assumptions; the intervention entailed transforming what constituted appropriate procedures, materials, gestures, or exhibition contexts of art. Conceptual Art’s modest objects, its push–pull with the gallery and art criticism system, and its attempts to deny the mythology of artistic genius aimed to change the character of art, to dislodge it from its complicit position in bourgeois culture. Initially, Conceptual Art’s general tendency to remain within its own confines, to use art in order to redefine art, distanced it from outright political involvement. In 1969, Kosuth, and many others, considered the preoccupation with the analytic superior to the synthetic preoccupation with concrete worldly events.4 Analytic Conceptual artists questioned the function of the object by focusing on the linguistic proposition. Working from the mid- to late 1960s, Kosuth and the English Art & Language group (which later developed a branch in New York) were concerned predominantly with abstract questions regarding the meaning and context of art. In an art world still dominated by Abstract Expressionism, Conceptual Art was an intervention into that movement’s media-specific based approach to art and its criticism. In this respect Conceptual Art’s negation still operated within the confines of art as an academic discipline. Conceptual artists were part of a generation that became professionalised; their careers commenced with formal studies of art. If we think about art as an academic discipline, we can consider both its professionalisation and the change in attitude to political art as part of a wave that swept academia and culture at large. The overt politicisation of Conceptual Art was concurrent with its opening to a series of influences from other fields, all of which were

The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

somewhere along the course of the transformation of their methods. A wave of renewing Leftist perspectives was also underway. But most significantly, this change has evolved not only, as Kosuth mentioned, from the investigation of foundational questions about the structure and meaning of art as a field, but also under the influence of rights movements that created a period of heightened political turmoil, manifested by multiple forms of protest in the public sphere. The participatory democratic struggles of Civil Rights, which propelled the development of Black power movements, women’s and minority rights-movements, and anti-war activism, together with the worldwide student and Leftist uprisings, were amplified by the end of the 1960s. In the 1970s, the politics of the 1960s expanded and splintered into a series of smaller or more particular interest groups or perspectives. What Ramsden saw negatively as pluralism in art was partly a postmodernist opening out into the vast outlooks and strategies of identity politics. Artists concerned with the politics of race, gender, and sexuality were part of the shift to integrative thinking that also placed the assumptions and criteria of traditional disciplines (painting and sculpture) under scrutiny, using other academic disciplines to shift their critical point of entry. They brought semiotics, linguistics, cinema studies (where concurrently images as signs, and narrative as their syntax, were being “read”), and ideological analysis to bear on both form and content.5 The turn was not necessarily to narrative art, but to identity as a semiotic effect, a function of language rather than an inherent essence, and, in analysing the ubiquitous operation of language, a mode of access to political agency. Identity was not necessarily a means to represent the self, but rather was activated as that part of the subject that was shared with a group, and around which the group formed a political agenda. By the 1970s, artists were transmitting the possibility for critical distance to be seen by the viewer simultaneously with the reception of the work. The question with which artists were grappling was not whether art should be political or not, but how art was to address politics given everything that was being articulated about the power of images, the role of art in bourgeois culture, and its complacency with the capitalist power structure.6 This chapter takes a comparative look at several models of interdisciplinary conceptualist practices that responded critically to Conceptual Art’s original claims. Artists responded to a limitation they identified in the narrow focus of early Conceptual Art, and turned to the social, the political, and the “lifeworld,” external to the hermeneutic definition of art. When this second wind of conceptualism integrated external subject matter, it was no longer in the modernist sense of art and politics. Synthetic conceptualism incorporated the basic investigations of Conceptual Art to form a complex method of artmaking that was deconstructive just as it was referential. Artists integrated a meta-critique to reveal frameworks that endowed artistic language and

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strategies with pre-conceived meaning. Analytic in its structural interrogation, their work added the synthetic, referring the viewer to political subject matter outside the realm of self-referential art. Feminism was a major catalyst in this transition. Three artists exemplify this shift. Adrian Piper transitioned from an analysis of the art object as a factor of time and space to the role of cultural forms in formulating gendered and racialised social meaning; Mary Kelly from labor and gender issues to the discourse of the subject; and Martha Rosler from the documentary mode to the critique of representation in mass media. They all shared an interdisciplinary approach, with which they sought to bring knowledge from other fields to bear on art. Piper applied philosophical demarcation of time and space to the interpersonal weave of the urban human fabric; Kelly expanded a focus on labor politics to a feminist psychoanalytic critique of Conceptual Art; and Rosler synthesised a broad range of approaches to the political previously seen as antithetical to one another. Although Conceptual artists formulated their practice in opposition to the expressionist model, they nevertheless maintained some of the epistemological underpinnings of the preceding movement. Still based in an enlightenment-age ethos, Abstract Expressionism was positioned by its main critic, Clement Greenberg, as the latest link in a trajectory of artistic autonomy and self-criticism, as articulated by Kant. The enlightenment conception that art contains its own means of criticism was sustained within the antithesis offered by Conceptual Art. In her 1973 article “Sense and Sensibility: Reflection on Post ’60s Sculpture” Rosalind Krauss showed that this historical progression carried over elements of the past, highlighting the thematic connection between the subjectivity of the abstract artists and that of the Cartesian notion of the subject operating in Conceptual Art.7 For Krauss minimalist art indeed broke with the movements that came before it, but she distinguished it from the world-view of “post-minimalist” or “dematerialist” practices that demarcate Conceptual Art (with Sol LeWitt’s position, again, remaining in debate). Krauss cites Kosuth’s argument that the analytic proposition is a representation of the artist’s intention, claiming that it therefore represents “the privacy of the mental space.”8 It was, according to Krauss, much closer to the expression model of Abstract Expressionism, where the work reflected the artist’s interior self that was considered more or less coherent. Juli Carson highlighted Krauss’s discussion of Robert Barry’s work (as one model of Conceptual Art): Krauss argues that Barry’s notion of the mind is definitively Cartesian because it is based on a privacy model, reliant on the notion of a confined mental space. The problem with this model, she asserts, is that it posits our sensations against what is knowable and verifiable through the outside world of conventions. Lurking here is a model of intention as a private internal mental event, whereby

The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

the artist puts his internal idea into the exterior world, such that an exteriorization of an interior pre-existing self is produced.9

In contrast, for Krauss, minimalist art effected a condition for the viewer where a sense of self as experienced, was fragmented from a sense of self to be mentally understood, thus pointing to a more complex articulation of existence. Kosuth’s early support of the analytic proposition as a mode of universalist abstraction over the synthetic advocated against the particularism of synthetic artwork. But the subsequent negotiation of conceptualism with the political referent was complicated by the recognition that direct access to one knowable reality is impossible, but rather, reality is always mediated by material forms and textual language, thickened by sets of ideological predispositions, cultural contexts, and subjective associations. These were the ways in which synthetic proposition art rendered a more complex dynamics of being; the ways in which a notion of concrete politics entered into the artwork were thus far from simple. The synthetic proposition: from philosophy to political art

Placing emphasis on the artwork as philosophical proposition over and above its visual appearance, Kosuth’s First Investigations series of the late 1960s, subtitled Art as Idea as Idea (1966–69), was a series of enlarged photostats of dictionary entries for words, chosen deliberately for their close reference or association with the art-related ideas he was activating, including: “art,” “meaning,” “content,” or, in a deliberate tautology, “definition”—which was a photographic reproduction of a word that referred to itself, becoming both the definition of the word “definition,” and a philosophical artwork about meaning. The latter in particular evoked one trajectory of the Duchampian readymade, being something of a condensed version of Jasper Johns’s interpretation of Duchamp, reflected in Johns’s quintessential flag paintings of the mid- to late 1950s. Using the flag as subject matter, Johns set up a paradoxical relation between the work of art and its referent. The tautological relation of the painting of a flag to its representational capacities operated on both a material and a symbolic level, with the flag as material reminiscent of the fabric from which standard flags are typically made and thus evoking the object-ness of any painted canvas, while also referring back to the inherent symbolism of any representation of the star-spangled banner, thus leveling the painting with the many strata that such an object can take, from the cheapest plastic iteration to historical specimen. The tautology where the painting of a flag is both a flag and it is not, is abstracted further in Kosuth’s work where a definition of a thing can point to an idea, or substitute for it, “art,” with all other entities to which Kosuth referred slipping between the ephemerality of their being in definition and

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the actuality of the enlarged photostat as physical object. The operation of the work was to abstract the term and place it for analytic observation, emptying it of expressive affect, persona, and emotionality; an ideal impossible to convey, as the isolation of a single word would always point to the infinite ways it would inevitably proliferate in the viewer/reader’s mind. Interestingly, one of Kosuth’s investigations included the definition of the term “self,” evoking a central element of high modernism that strongly relied on the mythologies of turbulent artistic subjectivity and notions of genius (Figure 1.1). For Kosuth in the mid-1960s, art’s goal was to unpack its own definition by activating analytic propositions that used art to define what art is, in a Duchampian approach. Thierry de Duve finds fault with Kosuth’s argument, pointing to Kosuth’s confusion of the relation of thought to itself and its history with the act of thinking working through human perception: Suffice it to say that Kosuth’s most blatant confusion is between the logical genre of discourse, which does not need a referent to assign truth value to a proposition, and the cognitive genre, which requires the designation of a referent for its verification. In short, conceptualism simply ignores the thesis in the modern version of the Kantian antinomy, by making the sentence “this is art” run in circles.10

Nevertheless, when demonstrating that the achievements of Conceptual Art were ultimately completely indebted to Duchamp (despite misinterpreting his message), de Duve underscored the significance of Kosuth’s essay: Kosuth’s “separation between aesthetic and art,” his theory according to which works of art are analytic propositions that “express definitions of art,” his conclusion that “art operates on a logic,” are relatively coherent attempts to register the linguistic turn which the readymade had imprinted on the history of modernism since 1917.11

Kosuth meant art broadly, and not as one medium or the other, as indicated by this oft-cited passage: “That’s because the word art is general and the word painting is specific. Painting is a kind of art. If you make paintings you are already accepting (not questioning) the nature of art.”12 However, it was not only the type of specificity one finds in painting or sculpture that Kosuth opposed, but even more so the specificity of the appearance of worldly phenomena, which was unverifiable philosophically. For Kosuth the correct attitude was in analytic propositions—statements that are evidently true to anyone who understands the language without having to verify this truth with any corroborating evidence, for example: “all bachelors are unmarried” is an analytic proposition, which according to Ayer was, as a category, the only way to formulate a tautological proposition which is knowable a priori, and thus meaningful without need for external verification.

The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

Ten years later, as the impact of the social movements on artistic practices had become evident all around, Kosuth introduced a reformulated position in his article titled “1975,” maintaining that the political turn in art grew out of its basis in the analytic. The article addressed the question of Conceptual Art’s “failure,” the way its developments have disappointed its original aims. In opposition to his earlier position, he observed a transition from the analytic proposition to an application of the abstract and the general, towards a synthetic approach as continuous rather than mutually exclusive, observing that this continuum has self-corrected along the way. With a new approach to evaluating Conceptual Art, Kosuth now distinguished between stylistic and theoretical Conceptual Art (SCA and TCA); the first merely exchanged old tradition with new techniques, the latter in contrast probed the nature of art by performing “infrastructural analysis,” as well as “exposing institutional contradictions and thereby obliterating art ideologies which presuppose the autonomy of art.”13 For Kosuth, the probing of art provided a disciplinary basis that was then extended to broader social concerns: “I think it is no accident that the art which I am describing in this article (TCA), as the first to address itself to a conscious self-reflexive dialectic with society/culture, is the one and the same that was so radically concerned with the internal or infrastructural mechanism of art.”14 In many ways the artists addressed in this chapter operate within Kosuth’s logic, as their concerns with the social and the cultural grew directly out of their preoccupation with foundational questions about the status of the art object, its role, its authorship, and its circulation. In a conversation with Mary Kelly, Terry Smith (a member of Art & Language 1972–76) positioned Conceptual Art’s early motivations in the Marxian-based assumption that pure artistic experiment sufficiently implied the political. But these attitudes changed with the advent of feminism: In the early 1970s, however, things shifted. Analytical work continued, but it became also synthetic in the sense that the practice was expanded to become an inquiry into subjects and experiences which were much broader than art and its languages, and, of course, into theories for thinking, for speaking, these subjects and experiences. This is an obvious impact of the social movements of the 1960.15

Feminist analysis brought about the realisation that the oppressions in the public sphere were interrelated with the gender inequality that manifested in the private sphere, and vice versa, and, as Smith emphasised, feminism also revealed how the universal crisis of capitalism affected relations constitutive of our sense of self, all of which were mediated by an ideological structure organised along the lines of a gendered regime. The career of the art critic Lucy Lippard echoed the transition from artistic preoccupation to the integration of art and political concerns.16

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Lippard, with John Chandler, coined “dematerialism,” one of the central terms in the description of conceptualist practices.17 She later shifted to art activism and an inclusive feminist perspective. Many of her projects became models of both artistic and administrative structural change.18 In her “Survey of Street Works Downtown,” Lippard characterised the brief period of optimism in New York between 1968 and 1971, when artists came together in defiance of expensive uptown galleries and organised co-op buildings and exhibition spaces: There was at this point a mood of exhilaration, a feeling that control over art was being returned to the artists’ community. In opposition to the intellectually demanding, often hostile and cliquish atmosphere of the 1960s avantgarde, the end of that decade saw a brief politicization of artists on a model set by Blacks and students.19

The surge of politicisation that briefly seized the New York art scene originated from multiple points. The first protests by African-American artists and critics of the Whitney Museum in 1968 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) in 1969 were followed by the activities of the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC). A wave of energy around anti-war, racism, and sexism culminated in the visible New York Art Strike against War, Repression, Racism and Sexism. Having persuaded many museums to close on May 22, 1970, protestors picketed the Met when it declined to participate.20 Under the leadership of Robert Morris and Poppy Johnson, artists withdrew their participation in the Venice Biennial that year in protest of the war in Vietnam. A part of his general art strike, Morris closed his solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum early, and as Julia Bryan-Wilson argued, this was not unrelated to the sweeping wave of labor strikes that took place between the late 1960s and the early 1970s.21 Artists and arts professionals concerned with social equality wrote about and protested the fact that institutions of art represented the ruling class and functioned in accord with its ideological apparatus. Debates ensued about the sites, modes, methods, goals, and strategies that the intervention of politics into art should take. In this context Lippard credits AWC with the achievement of forcing the museum to listen: Few of us today have any illusions left about the existence of a truly political art. Such an art (not a style) would not merely illustrate the wrongs of a society nor even merely encourage rights, but would contain a built-in threat to that society. Similarly, the AWC is more potent as a threat to the art-institutional status quo than as an activist organization.22

AWC, and the splinter groups it inspired, worked to expose the complicity of the art system with the war machine and capitalist oppression, finding the parallels between the issue of artist rights and the ways in which museums

The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

trustees were invested in enterprises that supported war industries and oppressive regimes internationally. Documenting their activities, they left for posterity a record of the position of museum governance.23 However, AWC was lacking in several respects. For example, although the minority demand for participation and representation was theoretically on the agenda, in reality it was nowhere near enough. As Michele Wallace later underscored: A group of famous white male artists led by Robert Morris decided to withdraw their work from the Venice Biennale, a prestigious international exhibition, in order to protest United States military involvement in Vietnam. Although the protest was supposed to be against “racism, sexism, and repression,” Art Strike then expected to mount a counter-Biennale in New York without altering the all-white male composition of the show.24

Consequently, AWC participants such as Faith Ringgold established alternative organisations. With her daughter Michele Wallace, Ringgold formed Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL), who were ultimately successful in persuading the organisers of the alternative show to have an “open show” that included a significant amount of work by women and minorities, despite meeting strong resistance, some of which came from white feminists.25 The combination of multiple provocations subsequently received institutional attention. Wallace recalls: In one case, I can remember museum administrators and security guards standing helplessly by as Faith led a walking tour through MoMA’s first-floor galleries during which she lectured on the influence of African art and the art of the African Diaspora on the so-called modern art displayed there.26

These ideas began to spread into the mainstream of the art establishment, among artists, then leaders and administrators of institutions. In his extensive contextualisation of MoMA’s disposition, Francis Frascina examined the attitude of its curators and trustees in the face of escalating protests: In June 1970, James Soby wrote to David Rockefeller and Bill Rubin (with a copy to Alfred Barr) worried about protests by what he called “ethnic and biological groups” and claimed that the Museum could not “show or buy more works by Negro or female artists without letting down our standards.” Barr replied saying that he thought Soby’s letter was “excellent”. He wished that “we had talked more about the Blacks” and that the Museum “should do something— perhaps a careful show or even a small exhibition of what we have in our collection.” A Trustees Executive Committee Meeting was held on 25 June to discuss the “subject of Museum involvement in minority concerns” which Paley [president of the board of trustees] thought too important to bring to a head at a recent Trustees meeting. It was resolved to set up a Committee of the

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Trustees: a “Black, Puerto Rican and Other Ethnic Studies Program” to recommend any changes in the operations of the Museum. The whole investigation and proposals were largely to be kept in house and relatively private. None of these comments or decisions would have encouraged any of the protestors. Rather they would have confirmed their view about the assumptions held within the institution—assumptions that positioned the interests, identities, art practices and critiques of the protestors as “other” but in need of ameliorating through the processes of public relations.27

The racist and sexist basis of modernist criteria could not be spelled out more clearly. Awareness of these facts and how they remain perpetuated, was, and still is, a slow process of scraping away layers of compromised recognition, each revealing sediment biases. AWC peeled one layer, also recognising that participation in the system ultimately amounts to complicity. In her multiple reflections, Lippard acknowledged that Conceptual Art, activism, and women’s art had all ultimately been absorbed into the system before being able to define change on their own terms. Writing in 1975, Art & Language member Mel Ramsden criticised Lippard and many of her cohorts at AWC for failing to substantially undermine their own liberal framework. In “On Practice,” written for the first issue of The Fox, he criticised what he referred to as the “adventuristic” New York art-world, ostensibly politically engaged, yet using political activism as a careerist platform and/or failing to ask fundamental questions. At its heart, Ramsden’s critique of AWC addressed its failure to tackle universal questions. For him, that AWC never questioned what was meant by the term “work” in “art worker” is what allowed it to separate questions of ethics from those of aesthetics. Ramsden wrote: “I remember finally coming to the conclusion that the impotence of the AWC lay in this refusal to deal with ‘work’—what we each do; that is, practice.”28 However, even if AWC did not in fact directly redefine artistic practices, it was part of a wave of change within which many of its individual participants contributed significantly to the redefinition of art. If the effects of this wave did not yet manifest in 1975, they did so gradually throughout the coming decade. Lippard described how despite the multiple difficulties, inefficiencies and internal conflicts, the organisation was nevertheless driven: “by an excited realization that the MOMA was, for some inexplicable reason, afraid of us,”29 a feat that Conceptual Art surely could not claim. Another important contribution of AWC was their involvement with unionising MoMA professional staff, a union that exist till this very day, protecting the workers in every cycle of contract renegotiation. Museums have since dramatically transformed their culture and attitude towards the rights of artists and towards inclusion of broader publics; the addition of a free day, a currently prevalent museum practice, is widely attributed to the

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efforts of AWC. With all its limits, AWC was part of the broader movement that brought about a measure of change to the art world. This influence of artists and art personnel on both content and structure resides in the realm of praxis, between theory and practice. In his reformulated position of the mid-1970s, Kosuth applied his definition of praxis to characterise theoretical Conceptual Art (TCA): The work closest in time to “minimalism” appealed to the innate structure of “logic” of western civilization, more recent work (TCA) has increasingly consisted of revealing, through praxis (action on the superstructural level), that “logic.” The older scientistic, analytic model was passive (relied on institutions for meaning); whereas the dynamic of the new work must, in part, consist of revealing the contradictions and as such has as its task the dismantling of the mythic structure of art as posited in the present day cultural institutions. The motor of art is that it is engaged. That is, the notion of art coming out of art speaks exactly of this. But our art, even if it is to be a model of culture, is not static, but an operating, continually changing, model. One of our tasks is to re-establish an equilibrium between its internality and its externality. It must be in the world.30

From the analytic to “being in the world”: this characterisation, Althusserian in its use of praxis to reveal the logic of how things work, is befitting for synthetic proposition practices, which reflect upon their own process of representation, their own coming into being by means of their self-representation, or by the forms and vocabulary of art. Recognition that language, discourse, cultural conventions, and institutional frameworks have direct concrete consequences in economic relations spread rapidly. In his most influential essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Louis Althusser revisited the work of Marx through Jacques Lacan’s definition of the subject, the latter influenced by the linguistics of de Saussure, to show how the conditions created by ideology have, through their ubiquitous manifestation, rendered concrete effects on the life of the subject. Ideology pre-exists such that subjects are indoctrinated within given conditions, as they enter into language at the early stages of consciousness development. Althusser distinguished between what he called “ideological state apparatuses” (ISA) and “repressive state apparatuses.” While the latter—government, its administration, the army, police, courts, or prisons—expressed their power overtly and violently, ISA functioned covertly through the family or the church, determining the subject’s perception of reality. As such it is also what sets the understanding of political conditions or labour relations, making these concerns just as foundational as Marx’s “base.”31 Earlier, Marxists consider the superstructural secondary to the machinations of the “base,” consisting of the relations of production, labor relations, and capital that

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form the economy. The basis of what Kosuth referred to, not necessarily in a negative way, as “action on the superstructural level,” was being reconfigured in Althusserian terms. The idea that Conceptual Art can intervene into labor relations, relations of production, or any other foundational strata by addressing art’s economy was always merely symbolic. Any kind of action would in itself already be a form of representation, for clearly, once anything resides within the realm of art, it has no influence on the means of production of the capitalist economy. Art can only be superstructural. Politics themselves are already superstructural. Only relations of production are the base. Early Conceptual Art’s ideas of meaningful interventions into the infrastructure of art are metaphorical, and even the intercession into labor relations in the practices of institutional critique is in effect a reification of the interventionist process, turning a gesture into a type of art object, no matter what the artist may claim. Since positions are necessarily articulated not only by language, but also by vocabulary and convention, the foundational critical capacity afforded to art is into means of representation, not production. Adrian Piper: levels of political art

“Information” (MoMA, 1970) brought together practices concerned with the intersection of politics, and the artistic question of how those should be conveyed. As articulated by curator Kynaston McShine: If you are an artist in Brazil, you know of at least one friend who is being tortured; if you are one in Argentina, you probably have had a neighbor who has been in jail for having long hair, or for not being “dressed” properly; and if you are living in the United States, you may fear that you will be shot at, either in the universities, in bed, or more formally in Indochina. It may seem too inappropriate, if not absurd, to get up in the morning, walk into a room, and apply dabs of paint from a little tube to a square of canvas.32

Also rethinking conventional catalogue content and format, McShine allotted to each of the participating artists a page in the publication. Like many others, Piper’s catalogue entry was an additional contribution rather than a documentation of her physical installation in the exhibition. In “Three Models of Art Production Systems” (1970), Piper used conditional logic to explain three possible permutations of the artistic process, and three variations of relations between “input,” “consciousness,” and artistic “product,” which could be anything as long as they were defined by the context as art.33 Her abstract outline of artmaking typologies described the contemporaneous redefinition of authorship, process, and object status of art. The approach in “Three Models” was concerned solely with the study of art production, a description of types of processes that can yield philosophically abstract work, void of any external subject matter.

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Her contribution to the exhibition itself, Context #7 (1970), marked the transitional phase between Piper’s analytic and synthetic periods (Figures: 0.2–0.5). She later recalled: I think Context #7 established the fundamental interpersonal dynamic of virtually all the work I did from that point up to very recently: put a work into a public space to catalyze its audience, invite that audience to express its reaction, and integrate that reaction into the future evolution of the work. My essay in the catalogue, Three Models of Art Production Systems, was a distillation of my observations of my own creative processes, and those were the processes that Context #7 embodied.34

The method of making Context #7 was analytic in how it undermined the given conception of what an art object may be. Yet, it also referred to specific events since the structure of the work was based on inviting the audience to respond, an informal sociology that brought into the museum actual contemporaneous cultural attitudes. For Context #7 a typed sheet attached to the wall gave the viewers general instructions about what to do with the blank notebook and pen offered on the table below: You (the viewer) are requested to write, draw, or otherwise indicate any response suggested by this situation (this statement, the blank notebook and pen, the museum context, your immediate state of mind, etc.) in the pages of the notebook beneath this sign. The information entered in the notebook will not be altered or utilized in any way.

The seven binders filled by the audience over the course of the exhibition left for posterity a portrait of the museum visitors’ state of mind and thus, in many respects, the state of mind of the New York City population, including youths, artists, and tourists, at the dawn of the 1970s. The drawn and written entries reflect the preoccupations of the visitors—peace and anti-war clearly in the forefront, with calls to free imprisoned Black Panther Party members cropping up frequently, along with several “Free Timothy Leary” comments. Most visible were reactions to the now famous Andy Warhol statement: “In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes,” enlarged and installed on the same wall as Piper’s work (Figure 0.1). Personal confessions were plentiful, as were general statements about life, existential musings, responses to the museum, observations about the viewing experience, some expressions of confusion in the face of the exhibition as a whole, and commentary such as “museums should be free,” or “Duchamp lives.” Existent, but not abundant, were acknowledgements of feminism, while various entries displayed a changing attitude towards gender relations and sexual liberation. Many respondents expressed their opinions about the art itself, with a majority

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supporting the appearance of new aesthetics and only a minority debating the artistic merit of the new information art. A wide variety of comments addressed the blankness of the pages that the work was offering, with a distinct amount of remarks about Zen or nothingness echoing this sentiment, also demonstrating the contemporaneous influence of Eastern philosophies. Visitors read and responded to each other’s entries, and occasionally a series of comments on one page amounted to a debate. In scale, method, and comprehensiveness, Context #7 did not attempt to be scientific, precluding an analysis of the data or further theorisation of the visitor experience. However, other than a few objections, the recorded responses of the general audience reveal openness and ability to meaningfully engage with the new and experimental forms of art that MoMA governance was so ready to reject. With the term context in its title, the work pointed the viewer to their surroundings and directed attention to the framework of the art. The work’s politics appeared in two forms. The first was analytic, where viewers were directed to consider “context,” in this case the institution that housed the work. The second was synthetic, pointing to the moment there and then, the actual environment, whereas the political was still embedded in the process of the work’s production. With the audience directly involved in making the artwork, it opened up to the world and allowed it in. But this too can refer back to a Duchampian strategy, in the sense that it reframed the political issues expressed in the Context #7 notebooks as “found” objects, a kind of a readymade. Duchamp inserted the readymade to point to the capacity of the art context to enunciate an object as art. Building upon this foundation Piper introduced a poll into the exhibition space, treating the writing tools and the opinions of visitors as readymade, allowing the outcome to reflect the instability and uncertainty of human interaction. Also establishing a situation where the work created itself, Piper’s Context #8 (1970) was similarly meant for display in binders. Its first page explained the way in which it was created: “Written information voluntarily supplied to me, during the period of April 30 to May 30, 1970.” The work therefore consisted of various items that revealed her cultural environment as an artist and student in 1970 in New York City, including: a letter from McShine about installation details and a loan form for Context #7, invitations to Hannah Weiner’s performance show at Max’s Kansas City, and to Language IV at the Dwan gallery (Piper participated in both), an evening of Steve Reich’s music at the Guggenheim, the agenda for the Art Strike Committee meeting, as well as a typed 8.5 × 11 in. performance score detailing the parameters of Steps (Stepping Off Place) (1969) by Vito Acconci. Part of the circuit On Kawara established through his mail-art, the work also originally contained a series of postcards Piper had received, titled: “Dear Adrian Piper, I woke up at … ” (series of thirty postcards for each day of April, 1970).35 Art-world related

The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

materials were overwhelmed by a plethora of fliers and newsletters reflecting the energy of the radical atmosphere on college campuses internationally: student newsletters and manifestos, statements, calls for protest, actions, and teach-ins about the recent campus shootings in Ohio, Mississippi and Jackson State, Georgia; flyers emphasising solidarity with labor unions, the internal struggles against war and racial oppression, as well as the plight of third world inhabitants, the suppression of the Black Panther Party, or withdrawal from Vietnam and Cambodia. Calls for free admission highlighted the centrality of education to the ability of working classes and minorities to transcend their predicament and thus to stop the social chain that reproduces the means of production—arresting development to keep an available labor reserve. Jean Genet’s “Here And Now for Bobby Seale” was also included, as were a letter from the Civil Liberties Union on demonstration guidelines and a handful of religious flyers. The formal relationship of “instruction-based” conceptual works and the directive tone so prominent in the political fliers inadvertently came to the fore, evidencing a stylistic affinity between conceptualism and contemporaneous political speech. Context #9, “Written Information Ellicited [sic] from Me During the Period of May 15 to June 15, 1970,” amassed grocery lists, memos, instructions, calculations, telephone numbers and addresses, class notes, sketches and plans for future artworks, and a 32-page astronomy course paper titled “Origin of Solar Systems.” Drafts for the works Structured Performance Situation and Making Space were juxtaposed with the formal university examination paper, its graphs depicting locations and movements of celestial bodies. The former, sketches for artworks showing the layout of performer bodies and audiences distributed in exhibition spaces, echoed the latter’s location of celestial bodies in orbit. These inevitable comparisons between forms of information did not necessarily mean that one discipline emulated the other, but rather they foregrounded the awareness that knowledge was mediated through conventions whose context affected their meaning just as much as what was said within the confines of any discursive formation. Also included were the drafts for Context #7, an installation drawing for the instructions and the binders, and several notes to McShine; and multiple drafts for Withdrawal Statement, subsequently posted in lieu of an artwork Piper had withdrawn from the exhibition Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects (1970) in protest of national conditions of oppression. Piper withdrew Hypothesis from the exhibition, which was organised by Donald Karshan and curated by Joseph Kosuth at the New York Cultural Center, supplying them instead with a statement (original in capitals): The work originally intended for this space has been withdrawn. The decision to withdraw has been taken as a protective measure against the increasingly

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pervasive conditions of fear. Rather than submit the work to the deadly and poisoning influence of these conditions, I submit its absence as evidence of the inability of art expression to have meaningful existence under conditions other than those of peace, equality, truth, trust and freedom.36

The Context series first applied criticism abstractly, then, following the insights expressed by the movements of protest, began to refer to political specificities and their interconnections with arts and academic institutions. In the subsequent years, Piper integrated political content more deliberately and directly, but its origins in politics as a “found object” or a given condition, retained the Conceptual core in her later strategies. The series allowed the context of the work to make the object, becoming a kind of readymade that produces meaning by reflecting the climate of the moment as seen through the eyes of museumgoers. Rather than recontextualising the found object in order to poke fun at the absurdity of art as a social construction, as Duchamp did, the Context series was a way of opening the door, of allowing the world to flow in, and then exhibiting this flow with the framework of reference to which it belonged. Thus Context #7 showed the frame of mind of museumgoers, Context #8 the academic environment in comparison with that of art, and Context #9 the figure of the artist as a case-study, an example of a professional milieu. By positioning herself as the center of a field around which the work revolved, Piper isolated what Foucault defined at the time as “author function,” whereby the role of a work’s author is to be the measure for the constellation of discourse that circulates around that individual.37 Using everything that artist has “made,” albeit not necessarily deliberately as art, was a Duchampian gesture where the function of the artist was to contextualise readymade objects that were then exhibited as art. Emphasis was placed on the object choice, eliminating the significance of intention, or at least pointing to the relativity of artistic gesture, as the latter acquired meaning from its institutional context. It is not that the work did not rely on intent, but rather it isolated and displaced that item we name “artistic intent,” applying the pressure of artistic innovation not onto a final product, but to the forces that produce the work of art with the artist observing from the sidelines. This attitude towards the artwork has several Duchampian genealogies, ranging from Jasper Johns’s Device Circle (1959), through the work of John Cage, the minimalists, to Conceptual Art. Like several of her synthetic proposition contemporaries, Piper isolated components of the work of art believed until then to be inseparable. An example of undoing the unity of the art object can be seen in Funk Lessons (1982–84), which began as a sequence of “draft” performances that then led to a formal series of performances/lectures. Appropriating the structure of a typical university talk, Piper performed a set of events that were recorded and edited as video pieces. The videos were later presented to audiences that

The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

participated in a subsequent discussion, with the latter also recorded and then processed into what Piper termed Meta-performance lectures. As the Meta-performances took place in a gallery or art setting, they were contextualised by an art framework, but as educational content and not as an exhibition. Overall the various components form a recursive series of works that both challenge the unity and structure of the art object and reference a particular political question, namely that of xenophobia.38 The idea for the series came about when Piper was criticised for including funk music in a performance about the war in Indochina. To understand the reason for hostility against a form of music by an ostensibly liberal audience, Piper embarked on a series of covert performances/experiments at her home in order to examine the response of her dinner guests when she switched the background music from classical or jazz to funk. To her surprise she found that some guests were quick to leave, while others, mostly closer friends, were more willing to engage with the music or a demonstration of moves. A few were willing to converse about their discomfort with funk in relation to their fears about race relations. Out of these Piper developed the format for Funk Lessons, as a collaborative performance with her audience. It followed the format of a seminar or guest lecture where she analysed the structure and history of funk and its reception by mainstream culture, distributed a hand-out, and demonstrated moves, culminating with a set of actual dancing. Piper traveled the event, subtitled “A Collaborative Experiment in CrossCultural Transfusion,” around the country for about a year and a half, before taking it to the meta-level. Lessons consisted of analysing how rhythms function in Funk, how in Funk incompatible cadences are overlaid to create its rich texture, and how the dance was constructed from variations on a vocabulary of several basic steps. It is important to underscore that the performances themselves already had a meta aspect to them, in that the “lesson” consisted of not only explaining Funk’s basic structure and teaching the audience how to engage, but also how to critically think about one’s relationship to it. Piper was interested in the question of why some forms of popular culture were accepted as material for artistic appropriation while others were not. This question was applicable to Conceptual Art, which selectively encouraged appropriation of some forms of popular or pedestrian culture, rejecting others as crass. The monotonous, modular, and rhythmic character of Funk related it directly to the mundane, serial, and repetitive aspects of Conceptual Art—the foregrounding of rhythm over melody equivalent to the foregrounding of structure over narrative—in what can be characterised as direct formal continuity. One of the earliest artists to use the format of the guest lecture as a framework for the work of art, Piper was in effect applying institutional analysis to rethinking the format of the art object’s presentation. Funk Lessons

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was a comparative examination that revealed how different cultural dispositions located, or classified, Funk within the cultural field. It was synthetic in the sense that Piper’s analysis of racism’s operation was not just on the level of appearance, of cultural manifestation, but also on how the valuation of a cultural object has real implications through the direct bearing it has on maintaining people’s place in class stratification. The edited video Funk Lessons: Berkeley Performance (1983) intersected the lecture, demonstration, an interview with the artist, images of the audience dancing, scenes from Soul Train, and an offensive television segment of the executive secretary of the Alabama White Citizens Council warning against the dangers of the assimilation of whites into the vulgarity of “negro music.” Backwards and extreme, the segment represented historical attitudes towards Black popular culture, pointing to the origin of repressed and/or suppressed sentiments whose symptoms Piper was detecting in dominant culture. The work functioned on two levels. The first, direct, was meant to disabuse the audience from preconceptions about Funk and engage them with it as a cultural form. The second, experimental, examined the responses to Funk in order to determine where culture was standing at that moment in time. The awareness of how cultural classifications are a condition of their particular moment in time was foregrounded through Piper’s use of multiple kinds of footage from various historical moments that referred to funk. Funk Lessons: Meta-Performance (1987) was a tertiary outcome. Telling her audience at the Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago about the process that led to the performances and their meta-representation, Piper unpacked the ways in which cultural forms gain value or are devalued, and how in return these cultural taxonomies are linked to the politics of race and racial relations. In retrospect we may consider the entire series as both an artwork and a work of cultural analysis, an artefact/document hybrid. A form of praxis, an artwork whose subject matter is the valuation of another cultural form, it drew structural and content-based analogies for a comparative analysis that is theoretical yet functions through demonstration. The tendency to analyse how the context affects the meaning of a cultural form came from the analytic, or institutional-critique aspects of Conceptual Art, but it also echoed the growing intellectual trends that introduced new interdisciplinary hybrids between the humanities and social sciences, taking seriously typologies of popular, folk, or mass culture previously considered to be lowbrow or inappropriate as art. The interaction of disciplines with pragmatic political perspectives intersected intellectual life with lived reality. In a letter to Lawrence Alloway from 1984, Piper recalls attending a feminist consciousness raising group in 1972, where she realised that she could extrapolate from one experience to the other.“Being in the group enabled me to import the strategy for maintaining

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faith in my own perceptions due to the insights we compared and shared in the context of feminism to my own perceptions and thoughts about racism.”39 Jayne Wark recognised the feminist critique and extension of Conceptual Art in the work of four artists, including Piper. However, Wark repeated the same mistake made by all those opposing identity politics, reflecting the way both camps read the use of the synthetic proposition as a means to affirm subjectivity, quite contrary to historical evidence.40 Wark claimed: “For one thing, Conceptual art’s denial of subject-centered inquiry and the downgrading of the personal was problematic for new social groups seeking to articulate their experiences and redress existing relationships of power and inequity.”41 Indeed, there was intent to redress power relations, however, the critique did not come to affirm a sense of subjectivity as individual experience, but rather was an interrogation of how subjectivity is formed structurally. When Wark writes: “the subjective basis of Piper’s work ran counter to Conceptualism’s prohibition against subject-centered inquiry as part of its general critique of modernist individualism,” she is right about the second part, and wrong about the first.42 What is lacking is a distinction between “the subjective,” and “the personal.” Piper’s practice used personal stories, not in order to reaffirm a subjective basis, but quite contrarily to unravel the function of subjectivity as a set of social relations, demystifying it in order to structurally dismantle its imbrication within a racist patriarchal order. That her very own sense of self was imbricated within this order was why she persistently dissembled and reassembled it in her work. Mary Kelly: the political subject

Like several other key terms circulating then and now, “subject” also seems to bear several contradictory definitions. The tendency among artists seeking the scientificity of analytic thinking was to regard the term subjectivity in the sense of “self.” Nothing demonstrates this better than a personal anecdote. In 2009 I had a conversation with Michael Asher where I explained my interest in how urban mass media plays into the construction of subjectivity. “You cannot talk anymore about the subjectivity of the artist!,” Asher exclaimed in response.43 His remark exemplifies the tendency of Marxist Conceptual and institutional critique artists to define the term “subjectivity” in reference to the self, artistic or otherwise, and as resurrecting the expressive ethos of modernist art. For them the consideration of gender and the complex sets of oppression identified by feminists were secondary to issues addressed through class or other universalist frameworks of enquiry. In contrast, many of those using these terms have been laboring for years to distinguish between the various meanings of subjectivity, selfhood, or identity. Artists working with these notions considered them, as they developed throughout the 1970s, to be

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constructed entities. Since their strategies rendered identity or otherness as the subject of analysis, they clearly were not relying on the modernist notions of subjectivity, or expression of artistic genius. Mary Kelly engaged an enquiry of the subject influenced by feminism, psychoanalysis, and Althusserian Marxism. An American who worked in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, Kelly was active in several collective projects, such as the film The Nightcleaners Part 1 (1972–1975), with the Berwick Street Film Collective: Marc Karlin, James Scott, and Humphry Trevelyan; and the installation Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry (1973–75), with Margaret Harrison and Kay Hunt. These pioneering works closely observed the significant role gender plays in establishing labor relations, rendering women even more vulnerable to exploitation because of their child-rearing obligations, constituted by the ways in which indoctrination facilitates the naturalisation of domestic roles. Both works demonstrated how the construction of gender has direct implications on how labor forces can be exploited. Coming from Leftist activism that experimented with new aesthetic techniques, she continued a multi-pronged analysis of how the structure of language relies on gender distinction. In her essay “Art and Sexual Politics” (1977), Kelly argued for a feminist “problematic” over a feminist practice, where the question “what is feminist art” will not yield unified, essentialist, or exclusive forms of artmaking.44 She identified four types of feminist art production that seemed limited: female culture, or mother art, that emphasises “women’s work,” such as cleaning, ironing, or preparing food, in obsessive performances that highlighted victimisation; female anatomy, or body art, in which the woman identifies with herself and femininity associated with genitalia; feminine experience, or ego art, a narcissistic model that ultimately reifies the male gaze; and feminine discourse, or “Other art,” an analysis of the position of the female as subject, rather than object, which is therefore always in danger of being subsumed by dominant discourse.45 To avoid the traps outlined above, Kelly suggested we approach the question of representation by asking how its means function for an art practice. Her early work infused the Leftist critique of the division of labor with a psychoanalytic feminist perspective that revealed the double oppression of gender, internal and external. Kelly was an active participant in the feminist forum called the History Group (with Sally Alexander, Rosalind Delmar, Juliet Mitchell, and Laura Mulvey), which was associated with the New Left Review. They applied a feminist reading of psychoanalytic methods and poststructural theories to understand how ideological oppression affected women’s (and men’s, of course) psychic existence. As Kelly recalls: We argued that the psychic economy was regulated in the unconscious by the laws of the primary process, and it therefore required a theoretical method

The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

appropriate to that object, namely psychoanalysis—Freud’s certainly, but more controversially Lacan’s reading of it. This we initially discovered in the work of Althusser, laboriously pursuing untranslated references, not out of academic interest, but out of a sense of political urgency: to change our lives and what we saw as the iniquitous conditions of “all” women’s lives, blatantly enforced in the workplace (The Equal Pay Act was not effective until 1975) and more subtly sustained in the home through the naturalization of the woman’s role in child care.46

For Kelly, psychoanalysis was a means to criticise the patriarchal order (in which Conceptual Art was un-self-consciously steeped), not an affirmation of a notion of psychological artistic interiority. Tracing a “systems” genealogy of Conceptual Art, Luke Skrebowski considered Kelly’s synthesis: What Kelly meant by “synthetic” then was a form of art practice that rejected Kosuth’s approach by insisting that subjectivity be factored back in to any comprehensive investigation of art’s ontology. The mode of conceptual art that Kelly identified was then “synthetic” in a more straightforward sense; it synthesised ideas drawn from disciplines other than those considered “proper” by analytical conceptual art, namely Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Semiotics.47

Again, Kelly’s notion of subjectivity was not a means to represent the self. Her conceptualist work was formed in direct dialogue with Art & Language and Kosuth, whose focus on the analytic proposition was an interrogation of art as a system of meaning. Her turn to the synthetic was a response to the consequential concerns left out of the early stage of Conceptual Art and its approach to the political. It reflected the insistence that politics manifest in multiple aspects of life (not just what one does, but the very structure that determines how one thinks), and by extension in the multiple aspects of the artwork (not only how it’s made, but what kinds of concerns are considered legitimate) within its various contextual fields (not only display but also discourse). Her work expanded Conceptual analysis to show how gender division is transmitted in the usage of language systems and how they influence the construction of the subject, not in terms of the person, but as a model for subjectivity itself. As Juli Carson emphasised: “Kelly’s interest in the unconscious was not in the service of an interiorized, psychic space.”48 Instead, her work rendered that rubric of the subject that is identity as a socially constructed category that manifests in relative positioning within a socio-economic system. Gender identity, foundational to the construction of subjectivity, was isolated as a key category in the economies of meaning, and of social and labor relations. Consequently, according to Helen Molesworth, the distinction between essentialist and constructionist feminism became somewhat irrelevant, and was questioned by artists who located the domestic sphere as the site to

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examine the relations between gender and the space of hidden labor.49 Molesworth showed how Kelly, Judy Chicago, Martha Rosler, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles turned to gender-based work as a site to render visible how the private realm sustains the patriarchal public sphere. Significantly, Molesworth emphasised the contribution of feminist works to broader developments in art that was part of the: “Duchampian legacy of art’s investigation of its own meaning, value, and institutionality.”50 This Duchampian legacy dialogued with Conceptual Art, just as it did with what later came to be named identity politics. The epic installation Post-Partum Document (1973–79) (PPD) was the outcome of a six-year process of analysis and visual presentation of a motherchild relationship, with Kelly tracking her son’s acquisition of language, foregrounding the gendered character of language and ideology, and how the subject is always already subordinated to such conventions (Figures: 3.1, 3.2). The six consecutive sections and introduction were initially exhibited in increments, and reproduced as a book in 1983. Kelly presented a mother’s memorabilia of her care of and interaction with her son, from his infancy until he entered the formal educational system, annotated by tongue-incheek interpretations, mimicking the logic of disciplinary procedures, but advancing the “research” through association or metonymic relations, rather

3.1 

Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Introduction, 1973. Perspex unit, white card, wool vests, pencil, ink. 4 units, 25.5 × 20 cm each. Collection Eileen Norton, Santa Monica.

The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Introduction, 1973. Perspex unit, detail, 1 of 4 units, white card, wool vests, pencil, ink. 4 units, 25.5 × 20 cm each, detail, 1 of 4 units. Collection Eileen Norton, Santa Monica.

than as formal cause and effect relations. Diaper liners stained by faeces were presented as “evidence” in an analysis of the baby’s food intake; the infant’s utterances were interpreted with a glossary and an identification of a function; clay imprints of his hand accompanied an interpretation of his behavior; specimens of plants the child collected were assembled as if in a museum display; and panels reminiscent of the Rosetta stone humorously “translated” the child’s pre-writing marks and compared them to the mother’s diary entries. Satirical twists showed conventions of the field to be second-order signification systems representing the discourse of “the father,” the Lacanian nomenclature for the demands of mainstream society. Extending the Marxist notion of false consciousness with an understanding that consciousness is shaped within ideological systems, Kelly’s work underscored its own status as a practice of signification, comparing how various means of referring to subject matter function in an art practice. “Experimentum Mentis” (experiment of the mind) panels were later added to introduce each section, using Freudian and Lacanian theories to classify the developmental stage of the infant, and the gendered terms manifest with regard to infant development. Sections of PPD suggested the possibility of female fetishism, challenging psychoanalytic

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theory wherein fetishism was understood as a masculine phenomenon. By “fetishising” the memorabilia Kelly displaced the mother’s fixation on the child onto the artwork, also pointing to the fetishisation of the art object’s social and monetary value. For the Introduction section, flatly folded and snuggly framed baby vests were inscribed with the Lacanian schema of intersubjectivity, highlighting that language and objects mediate between the mother and the child over the course of the infant’s development into a subject, and through his introduction to social codes. Rather than representing the child, in Kelly’s referencing system an object like the baby’s vest pointed to the set of cultural conventions that help shape the subjectivity of both child and mother through behavior, speech, writing, classification, or socialisation. Kelly’s use of her point of view first entailed introducing into the Conceptual framework not just the synthetic, but also more specifically the shunned subject matter of motherhood. Her second strategic move was to demystify motherhood by subjecting its representation to an analytic procedure, to a poststructural conception of the definition of the subject. This complex constellation was hardly an exact science, thus that the grey area formed between fact and fiction or between the literary and the social-scientific, did very well to be taken up within the framework of art, putting all discourses on display, where the viewer could be shown one through the other.51 Rather than picturing a mother and child, the work demonstrated how the identity of the artist (mother) and the artwork (child) are formulated through the process of their separation and subsequent interaction, which establishes their (gendered) social position. For example, the panels of PPD’s first chapter Documentation I: Analysed Faecal Stains and Feeding Charts, 1974, refer both to the socio-medical conventions of charting the infant’s growth and to the systematic nature of Conceptual Art (Figure 3.3). In these, Kelly annotated the stains on the child’s diaper liners, systematically listing what the child had eaten—as if by comparing two means to represent the input and the output, language and stain, the mother was tallying the outcome of her nurture and then measuring her performance through the indexical mark left by the faecal matter. Open to myriad interpretations, depending on the system of meaning with which it could be read, it pointed to the act of “reading” an indexical sign as itself culturally determined. An absurd measure of course, for just as coffee stains cannot predict the future, so the diaper stains clearly do not reflect the mother’s competency; nevertheless, they point to her double anxiety: the impossibility to truly assess her performance, and the pressures of cultural measurement of such performance, in all its relativity and irrationality. A set of prototypes for the series demonstrates Kelly’s thought process and logic, evidencing feminist critique of those patriarchal aspects of the Left, conceptualism, and psychoanalysis. They trace her thoughts about the

The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation I, Analysed Faecal Stains and Feeding Charts, 1974. Perspex unit, white card, diaper linings, paper, ink, detail, 1 of 31 units, 35.5 × 28 cm. Collection, Art Gallery of Ontario.

possible ways in which the stained diaper liners could function as a signifier (Figures: 3.4–3.7): an index of the infant’s health (the mother’s performance), an emblem of her work and the social division of labor, or a symbol of the mother’s and/or the child’s desires, significantly, since meaning is always an intersubjective outcome. The prototypes prove that the preoccupation with subject and subjectivity formation is born from a universalist perspective, and has very little to do with a personal story or any form of portraiture. Comparing the conventions of child rearing, a dynamic set of rules where the “truth” value is relative to culture and historical period, to the institutional framework which was also subject to the truth-value of disciplinary conventions, Kelly showed how discourses frame for subjects the kinds of knowledge possible and the how contributions within a given field are measured. The enquiry reflected the work of Michel Foucault, who translated the structural thinking of his mentor Althusser to formulate a self-critical system for methodological reflexivity, applicable to analysis of art and culture. Carefully overlaid paradigms took the ephemera of child rearing as visual “evidence,” an intervention into the language that controls taxonomies and a satirical take on the self-import of disciplines that rendered knowledge as relative to

137

3.3 

Mary Kelly, Studies for Post-Partum Document: Documentation I, Analysed Faecal Stains and Feeding Charts, 1974. Perspex units, white card, diaper linings, paper, ink. 6 units, 35.5 × 28 cm each. Courtesy, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London.

3.4–3.7 

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its time and conventions. For example, in the section Documentation V, Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index (1977), objects collected by the child were classified in a taxonomy that echoed historical permutations of the disciplines of museology and biology (Figure 3.8). The visual vocabulary of specimens and diagrams recalls the origin of both science and art in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cabinets of curiosity. In the second panel, under the diagram, a seemingly unrelated conversation is quoted, where the child was asking a pregnant woman why he did not have a baby. The third panel, a medical illustration of a fetus in utero, is accompanied by a list of terms relating to somatic or psychological conditions and anxieties related to pregnancy. The classification system set up by the artist could almost pass as scientific, save for the deliberately farcical character of the connections that, on the one hand, reveal that the work here is not really science, but on the other, tease out the limits of the common denominator, the discipline of biology in all its relative truth-value. Asking how art signifies, Kelly’s work was part of the vaster shift in the humanities and social sciences to interdisciplinary perspectives led by questioning language and other modes of mediation that bring the subject into consciousness. Carson explained: Kelly’s statement that “the fecal stain is an index, emblem, and symbol,” was thus a formative theorization of the indexical sign as that which points to the subject’s heterogeneous desire within the site of domestic labor, presented here

3.8 

Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation V, Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams. Statistical Tables, Research and Index, 1977. Perspex units, white card, wood, paper, ink, mixed media, detail, 3 of 36 units 18 × 13 cm each. Collection, Australian National Gallery, Canberra.

The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

within the Conceptualist terms of a “system’s analysis” that wilfully entangled the artist-mother-analyst’s position within that interrogation.52

Kelly’s “social science” of her own child was not a private affair, but a case study examination, a means to draw on the mother’s experience as a model, even if at times it did draw on the personal. Psychoanalytic perspective was a means of intervention into Conceptual Art’s positivist rationality, reflecting that multiple forces, and not just the rational mind, form the underlying structure common to the machinations of the human subject, and render “the personal” an entirely different entity than the “subject.” As Carson emphasised: Pointing to the irrational in her investigation, Kelly aptly borrows Lacan’s term, experimentum mentis, to designate experiences that are unconscious, not empirical. Of course, one can’t actually analyse one’s own unconscious. The performative use of “experimentum mentis” is thus the first clue that the author (as maker of the work) and mother (as referent of the work) are “types” rather than authentic “originals.”53

Introduced in the early development stages of science, where the distinction between art and biology was not yet extant, “experimentum mentis” was first used by Galileo Galilei to characterise a mental thinking method not associated with actual experimentation. Borrowed by Lacan, it designated the complicated tension between theory and science in his practice, echoed by Kelly in the imbrication of artwork with other disciplines.54 This elaboration of art’s signifying system echoed a growing understanding in other fields that signification proliferates, and that meaning, in what Roland Barthes named second-order signifying systems, is full of slippages and inaccuracies that, as Kaja Silverman explained, stacked systems of connotation upon those of denotation. Citing Barthes’ discussion of the cover of Paris Match, where he showed how racial signifiers are mobilised in support of nationalistic identification, Silverman wrote: The photographic image and its corresponding concept are then seen as conjoining to form the denotative sign. That sign becomes a signifier in a second signifying transaction, that of connotation … Barthes’ scheme represents an improvement over Sausseure’s not only in that it accommodates connotation as well as denotation, but in that it accounts for motivated as well as unmotivated signifying relationships.55

Although in PPD Kelly did not use photography, but rather myriad other modes of presentation and representation, connotation was central to how meaning was assigned to objects and signs, and how interpretation was moved along, for example, from a taxonomical enquiry into nature, to a biological diagram of pregnancy (as natural phenomenon), to the naturalisation of the

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role of women in childcare, to the indoctrination of children into gender as destiny, to the cultural implications that pregnancy connotes. In Kelly’s case, as with other synthetic proposition artists, specific and material objects and signs were overlaid so as to bring in multiple types of signifying modes and tropes: indices, symbols, memorabilia, specimens, slips of tongue, and systems of thought were mixed, and syntactical connections were allowed to drop or reconnect but with a new grammatical logic. Opening the work to a much broader order of signification allowed artists to bring to light the subjugating elements of the system, while, in the negative space, also make visible those areas where a move to carve freedoms might still be made despite the inability of the subject to conceive of themselves outside ideology. Martha Rosler: a focus on mediation

Often discussed as a “post-conceptual” artist, Martha Rosler has been working within traditions and approaches to political art that were considered methodologically contradictory, made common by her insistence on specific and explicit subject matter, and a commitment to a Leftist critique of culture.56 As Laura Cottingham wrote: “Her work problematizes the taxonomies of thought that regulate both theoretical and quotidian thinking while refusing to abandon—as have so many postmodernist thinkers—the reality of the observable, the experiential, and the real.”57 Rosler’s work has negotiated photojournalism, documentary photography, and image-text photo-conceptualist strategies, seeking a critical means to address social issues while avoiding the trappings inherent to historical models of political artmaking. Rather than attempting to reconcile them, Rosler juxtaposed and overlaid strategies, allowing their respective contradictions to illuminate the blind spots inherent to one perspective or another. In the mid-1970s at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) she was part of a tight-knit group of photography students and faculty, including Allan Sekula, Phel Steinmetz, and Fred Lonidier, who together articulated a renewed program for a critical practice of documentary photography, which had become complicit with status quo ideology. Like other synthetic proposition artists, she highlighted cultural truth-value as a relative construct. Rosler constructed her video, photography, collage, and her appropriation of vernacular platforms, to position the viewer in a critical perspective vis-à-vis the activity of viewing the work, as in her repeated recontextualisation of the garage sale as a work of art. The Monumental Garage Sale was first exhibited at the UCSD Art Gallery in 1973, then in several places, before its crescendo as the Meta-Monumental Garage Sale at MoMA in 2012.58 Introducing a vernacular cultural form as art, Rosler, in a persona of a Southern California hippie, bargained and sold her own and other people’s used items. Played-back in the space was an audio recording of this persona contemplating the worth

The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

and value of these discarded objects and our fetishistic relation to them, the ways in which objects and money conceal real social relations. Directly addressing the viewer by questioning their motives (and her own) in regard to the garage sale and the recycling (reselling) of objects, she alternated it with explaining the machinations of the capitalist mode of production or reading from Marx. “Why not give it all away?” the character asks intermittently. Explaining the exploitative nature of profit from labor in a direct and accessible manner, the character poses: “Question: how do things get to be commodities. Answer: when they’re part of a system in which things are made for exchange, not for use, a system within which people sell their labor to others and in which labor is homogenized.” Like many of Rosler’s projects, the garage sale incorporated within it the legend or the key for the viewer to reflect upon how the message they were receiving was being constructed. It also reflected her complex relationship to common and popular cultural forms. In this respect Rosler acknowledged the contribution of West-coast conceptualism: And locally in San Diego, don’t forget John Baldessari. He came from National City, California—he wasn’t from the upper West Side, or the Lower East Side. He was an American! In 1968 his work provided the first time I saw a photograph exhibited as a nonvalorized object. It was painting on canvas that was, I think, a faithful rendering of a photo with a guy leaning against a pole smack in the middle, with the word “wrong” at the bottom. That is meta-discourse; I had never seen photographic meta-discourse before. Not only did he use a dumb photo, he made a point of it by sticking a word on it, because of course words were forbidden in photography.59

Somewhat characteristic of West-coast conceptualism, Rosler’s oeuvre exhibits an ambivalent love–hate relationship to mainstream culture’s double-edged sword—conformism on the one hand versus the ability to speak to larger audiences on the other. She did so with a comparative approach that had an eye on the visual as a mode of reference (not, for example, a means of visual pleasure) and other modes of communication, such as language. The juxtaposition of image and text structures each panel of the series The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (1974/75), where Rosler paired tightly framed photographs of empty storefronts in the Bowery, Manhattan’s skid row at the time, with lists of epithets for the word “drunk,” a term that evidently elicited a tremendous amount of synonyms (Figure 3.9).60 Classified by “typologies” of terms, one list includes: “stewed, boiled, potted, corned, pickled, preserved, canned, fried to the hat,” while another: “comatose, unconscious, passed out, knocked out, etc.,” the image-text relations oscillate between dark humor and reference to real tragedy. A surprise jolts the viewer/reader, as an image of empty bottles and its synonyms—“dead

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3.9 

Martha Rosler, Detail from The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, 1974/75. Forty-five gelatin silver prints of text and image mounted on twenty-four backing boards. 10 × 24 inches each.

marines, dead soldiers”—inevitably associate the conditions depicted with war, specifically the Vietnam War, opening further possible interpretations about the failure of the government to care for its veterans, and other broken promises of democracy under imperialist capitalism. Empty of inhabitants, the frontal images of the storefronts took an uniconic strategy, echoing the structural and operational analysis also seen in Piper’s and Kelly’s approach. The rejection of iconic representation was common to analytic Conceptual Art and analytic feminism. Admitting his initial oversight of the depth of feminist contribution to understanding gender as a constitutive element of the field of representation, Craig Owens emphasised the centrality of vision to Western Hegelian certitude. His analysis suggested that the feminist critique of photography advanced Conceptual Art’s battle against centrality of vision for art. “A work like The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems not only exposes the ‘myths’ of photographic objectivity and transparency; it also upsets the (modern) belief in vision as a privileged means of access to certainty and truth (‘Seeing is believing’).”61 Thus, it is not the subject matter of poverty that is shown in The Bowery but the question of how social phenomena are shown visually or articulated textually, and in what set of associations or ideological framework they are already steeped. Avoiding judgement or exoticisation Rosler showed the derelict state of the Bowery in the most forthright yet unsentimental way, an attitude Benjamin Buchloh characterised as Conceptual Art’s “degree zero” photography, which aimed for the most straightforward, un-heroic, or mundane affect.62 A development on the traditional documentary form, it denied the patronising or pitiful gaze seen in the work of Jacob Riis or the Farm Security Administration photographers, becoming a critique of documentary’s roots in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century reform movement, and of its liberal

The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

ideology. In “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary,” (1978) Allan Sekula gave several examples of artists who had been successful in “bracketing” the affective powers of photographic production as a means towards critical distance: Of the work I’m dealing with here, Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (1975) comes the closest to having an unrelentingly metacritical relation to the documentary genre. The title not only raises the question of representation, but suggests its fundamentally flawed, distorted character. The object of the work, its referent, is not the Bowery per se, but the “Bowery” as a socially mediated, ideological construction.63

Clearly Rosler avoided an easy referent such as the image of despair, pointing viewers to reflect upon their outlook on social problems, probing them to examine the limits of subjective vision and vocabulary, but also destabilising the notion of objectivity. The work suggested that a shortcoming may be found in the way descriptive language or photography rendered individuals as personally responsible for those problems that in effect are most likely structural, and that change is a matter of relating private mental space to the public dimensions of its construction. As Rosler explained: “The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems is a work of refusal. It is not defiant antihumanism. It is meant as an act of criticism: the text you are reading now runs on the parallel track of another descriptive system.”64 Reference was not a means to convey events, but rather itself had been turned into subject matter, up for scrutiny, not by abandoning a connection to reality, but rather by acknowledging the inadequacy of abstraction. Her series of jarring photomontages House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (1967–72) juxtaposed fanciful interiors from decorating magazines with images of battles or war horrors.65 The series was originally created as anti-war imagery for distribution at demonstrations and for publication in the alternative press (Figures: 3.10, 3.11).66 The effect of the shocking war images could be mitigated by their presentation in colorful news media; comparing them with the exaggerated idealism of the domestic scenes made the artificiality of the latter spring to the fore in both its cynical efforts to sell the viewer a lifestyle, and the recognition of the real price of Western living. Linking the prosperity of one culture to the demise of another, the series showed how the media naturalises and sustains consumerism and gender indoctrination, formulating the social fabric that treats war as an inevitable historical condition, not something to be corrected. In many respects this theoretical framework resides between Walter Benjamin’s utopian vision of mass media’s potential, and the influence of Althusser and others who considered mass media as a means to sustain ideological conditions or hegemony. Rosler’s work therefore contained both the impulse to harness the power of mainstream media, and

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Martha Rosler, Tron (Amputee), in Goodbye to All That, Issue #3 (October 13, 1970), back cover (p. 16). Newsprint.

3.11 

Martha Rosler, Vacation Getaway, in Goodbye to All That, Issue #10 (March 9–23, 1971), centerfold (pp. 6–7). Newsprint.

The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

a critical outlook that examined how mediation mechanisms relate to an oppressive state apparatus. As she explained: I aim for the distancing effect that breaks the emotional identification with character and situation that naturalism implies, substituting for it, when it is effective, an emotional recognition coupled with a critical, intellectual understanding of the systematic meaning of the work, its meaning in relation to common issues. In video I tend to seek this effect with a wrenched pacing and bent space; an immovable shot or, conversely, the obvious movement or the unexpected edit, pointing to the mediating agencies of photography and speech.67

Herein lies a synthesis of conceptualist tendencies and a feminist identity politics position, where identity does not emanate from the interiority of the subject, but is rather a conscious interface negotiating a field that is rendered and ordered by various means, seen and known through image and language and transacting in a socio-economic fabric. The viewer is not positioned to identify, but rather to recognise a mode of existence in which individuals have sliding scales of agency; the system itself embodies a power to organise life. Identity becomes a mode by which agency can be located and activated, a strategy that shared elements with both analytic Conceptual Art and a synthetic conceptualism. My point here is not to formulate an alternative genealogy of conceptualism, but rather show the overlapping concerns and the heterogeneous origins of works that both referenced political subject matter and responded to the constraints of their media. Rosler developed a variety of strategies to incorporate meta-discourse into the work itself. In Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), she parodied cooking channel programs to reveal their place in enforcing gender roles. Instead of a “proper” housewife, Rosler, in the role of a cooking demonstrator, acted out suppressed aggression as she alphabetically named kitchen utensils one by one, as if battling those ideologies of gender distinction pressed upon subjects by the societal organisation of everyday life, her mounting frustration escalating to the point where she cuts through the air with a knife to form the shapes of the last few alphabet figures. From the perspective of Mel Ramsden, as quoted in the epigraph, artwork addressing the ideological field was dealing with effects, rather than the roots of oppression in capitalism. In contrast, Rosler, and many of the synthetic proposition artists, insisted upon the constitutive capacity of ideology: “Some of the opposition to bourgeois cultural hegemony has taken on the Althusserian direction of ‘theoretical praxis’, which claims as revolutionary the theoretical work that bares the structures of capitalist domination in the field of ideology.”68 Juxtaposing sets of aesthetic vocabularies revealed the regimes by which they are governed. Rosler brought into her work the very same mechanisms she critiqued, to observe the place of art in the perpetuation of oppression.

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In synthetic proposition art, one mode of political action did not appear as more foundational or universal than another. Instead, there was a recognition of the cyclical impact of reference systems, whereby vocabulary determines how the subject understands their place in the world (Althusser’s notion of “interpellation”), which in turn sustains the ideology of the epoch, itself determining the ways in which language is used, and so on, as seen in Rosler’s work. Art, as it in effect can do very little with any Marxist notion of the relations of production, is able to only ever effect analysis, understanding, or change on the level of culture. Ideology is soundly art’s realm of analysis and where it can ultimately have discernible consequences by challenging conventions, assumptions, and the organisation of the fabric that renders the social order. This leads us to the second assertion by Ramsden that referential political work could only address the “mere” distribution of the pie, “mere” perhaps for those already inside the power structure or whose access to it would not be hindered by their position in the social strata. In many ways the distinction between the two approaches to political art, the analytic and the synthetic, echo the distinction between a revolutionary and a reformist model for social change. Writing about the significance of Étienne Balibar’s work, Bruce Robbins uses an anecdote to demonstrate the culture of this on-going fissure: At a debate in southern California in 2007, the French philosopher Alain Badiou informed the French philosopher Étienne Balibar that he, Balibar, was a reformist. “And you, monsieur,” Balibar replied, “are a theologian.” Both of these epithets have more than a grain of truth to them. Both also say something, alas, about why Badiou, Rancière, Žižek, and Hardt and Negri all sell better in America than Balibar. Reform sounds like a chore. But left-wing theology! That has an occult, revolutionary ring to it. In fact much of what passes for left-wing thinking in a country without an organised left is daydreams of the end of the world featuring mysterious, all-powerful messiahs—think of Hardt and Negri’s “multitude.” Žižek and Badiou operate at a higher level, but they too are drawn to scenarios in which Everything Is Suddenly and Utterly Changed.69

There is a compelling sobriety to this biting description, especially when it comes to the question of what political artists want to achieve with their art or what they want their protest to do. Despite the clear differences between their approaches, artists who turned to the synthetic shared a focus on mediation itself as the subject of scrutiny. Be it through first order signification embedded in the various functions of sign systems or language, the machinations of second order signifying systems, or the mediation of political representations, artists began to carefully unpack how language and images rendered their and our relation to reality.

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149

Conclusion: the reception of conceptualism

More than twenty years after the event of Conceptual Art, Silvia Kolbowski’s an inadequate history of conceptual art (1998–99) distanced the viewer from the moment it was reflecting upon (Figure 3.12). Here, Rosler’s basic “Systems,” photography and language, were rendered even more “Inadequate,” when filtered by the subjective nature of memory. For her installation Kolbowski reshuffled and recombined video footage of artists’ hands and audio recordings of their voices, taken as they described conceptualist pieces that they had witnessed. The request she disseminated read: Briefly describe a conceptual art work, not your own, of the period between 1965 and 1975, which you personally witnessed/experienced at the time. For the sake of this project, the definition of conceptual art would be broad enough to encompass such phenomena of that period as actions documented through drawings, photographs, film, and video; concepts executed in the form of drawings or photographs; objects where the end product is primarily a record of the precipitant concept, and performative activities which sought to question the conventions of dance and theatre.70

The result demonstrated a range of conceptualist typologies that focused on the politics of the art object, its circulation, context, and other ideological frameworks that gave it meaning, and expanded it into a broad set of practices.71 Perhaps reflecting Kolbowski’s “mailing list,” the artists she chose to reach with her call, the outcome was in any case remarkably heterogeneous. In it we can see that the major thrust of Conceptual Art’s expansion into conceptualism was the influence of late 1960s and 1970s politics. This was evident both in the

Silvia Kolbowski, an inadequate history of conceptual art (1998–99), video still. Video and sound installation; video loop, 55:00, sound loop, 1:59:59), image courtesy of the artist. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Purchase, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee.

3.12 

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retrospective reflections by early practitioners of a “pure” Conceptual Art, and in the clearly articulated intentions of conceptualist artists who engaged the politics of race, gender, anti-war, and sexuality, and the economy of culture. The latter’s strategies were not necessarily an attack on Conceptual Art, but in many cases a critique, an antithesis that aimed to correct omissions, and to synthesise the analytic and disciplinary approach of Conceptual Art with subject matter external to the internal dialogue of art. Artists took care to foreground the means of mediation: photography, language, and later video, in conveying “what happened” in history. By the late 1990s Kolbowski’s record reveals “inadequacy” as a recognised condition, with many descriptions of works focused onto the tension between memory and documentation, in what seems to be a conscious attempt by the subjects to disrupt the customary historicist thrust of bringing the audience “there,” to relive the moment. History was seen as a function of representation, but attention was paid to its concrete effect. One speaker resisted Kolbowski’s original request, and presented a piece that they were not even sure whether they had seen, or perhaps just heard about: It was done in California, I believe in … the ’70s, but you know, it maybe even wasn’t done. I have seen the location. What it is is a collector’s home, who commissioned a work by an artist. The artist moved a wall, a property line wall, a stone wall. He gave the next-door neighbours an extra, I felt it was an extra six square feet of property. And that was the piece. I like telling people about it, because I like it a lot. But I don’t think I actually saw it.72

The piece does exist. It is Michal Asher’s work, informally called “Property Line,” which I experienced in person together with Henry Hopkins and Tone Olaf Nielsen in 2001. A Marxist critique of private property that gave the collector something by taking away a piece of their land, it is a small gesture with big implications. There is poetry to the fact that an act deliberately created outside the discourse of subjectivity was ultimately recorded in history and amplified through a most subjective account. Notes 1 Joseph Kosuth, “1975,” The Fox 2 (1975): 89. The Fox was a New York-based publication, an important albeit short-lived spinoff from Art-Language, over which the group eventually splintered. 2 Mel Ramsden, “On Practice,” The Fox 1 (1975): 80. 3 Eve Meltzer, “Antepartum,” in Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013), 9. 4 For documentation of representative articles from the debates around Conceptual Art, including pointers to additional materials, see Alexander Alberro and

The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

Blake Stimson, eds., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 5 Exemplary is Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). First published in Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18. 6 This was a rekindling and updating of foundational Frankfurt School preoccupations, an influence that filtered into the United States through Herbert Marcuse, who broke from the Frankfurt School, yet carried many elements of their thinking. By 1975 Joseph Kosuth, for example, was citing Walter Benjamin. Together with Adorno, they greatly influenced the configuration of art and politics for the next two decades. See New Left Review, eds., Aesthetics and Politics (Radical Thinkers) (New York: Verso, 2007). 7 Rosalind Krauss, “Sense and Sensibility: Reflection on Post ’60s Sculpture,” Artforum 12, (November 1973): 43–53. 8 Krauss, “Sense and Sensibility,” 46. 9 Juli Carson, “Dematerialisms: The Non-Dialectics of Yves Klein,” in Air Architecture, ed. Francois Perrin (Los Angeles: MAK Center, 2004), 123. 10 Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 307. De Duve also cites Richard Sclafani, “What Kind of Nonsense Is This?”Journal of Aesthetics and Art-Criticism 33 (1975): 457. Sclafani writes: “Does Ayer’s analysis of the analytic/synthetic distinction support all of this? Kosuth might dimly discern something of the tautologous nature of conceptual analysis, but he has gone far astray in applying what he might have discovered.” It is important to underscore that at the time Kosuth was a very young undergraduate student of philosophy and that, regardless, his contribution not only to the development of Conceptual Art but also to the entire edifice of contemporary art is weighty. 11 de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, 382. 12 Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy,” Studio International 178, no. 915 (October 1969): 135. 13 Kosuth, “1975,” 90. 14 Kosuth, “1975,” 89. 15 Mary Kelly and Terry Smith, “A Conversation about Conceptual Art, Subjectivity and the Post-Partum Document,” in Alberro and Stimson, eds., Conceptual Art, 451. 16 Cornelia Butler, “Women—Concept—Art: Lucy R. Lippard’s Numbers Shows,” in From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969–74, ed. Cornelia Butler (London: Afterall Books, 2012), 16–69. 17 Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International 12, no. 2 (February 1968): 31–36, and Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 18 Beyond her extensive publications see: Catherine Morris and Vincent Bonin eds., Materializing “Six Years”: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Lucy Lippard’s Feminist Labor,” in Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 127–172; and Sabeth Buchmann, “Introduction: From Conceptualism to Feminism,” From Conceptualism to Feminism, ed. Butler, 8–15.

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19 Lucy Lippard, “The Geography of Street Time: A Survey of Street Works Downtown,” in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984), 52. 20 Barbara Rose, “Out of the Studios, Onto the Barricades,” New York Magazine, August 10, 1970. 21 Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Robert Morris’ Art Strike,” in Art Workers, 83–125. 22 Lucy Lippard, “The Dilemma,” in Get the Message?, 8. 23 Splinter groups included: Guerilla Art Action Group, Women Artists in Revolution, Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation. AWC was influential also in the development of Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee, and Puerto Rican Art Workers’ Coalition. For multiple perspectives on protest groups and alternative spaces see Julie Ault, ed., Alternative Art New York: 1965–1985: A Cultural Politics Book for the Social Text Collective (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press in collaboration with the Drawing Center, New York, 2002). 24 Michele Wallace, “Reading 1968 and the Great American Whitewash,” in Remaking History, eds. Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989), 107. 25 The group included artist Tom Lloyd. On their struggles, feats and defeats see Faith Ringgold, “The 1970s: Is There a Woman’s Art?” in We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1995), 173–216. 26 Wallace, “Reading 1968 and the Great American Whitewash,” 108. Wallace’s powerful criticism of the erasure of minority contribution, especially the central place of African Americans in the much-mythologised social movements of the 1960s is correct in my opinion, and her work at large has influenced my thinking. Yet, in defence of Todd Gitlin’s The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), I must cite his recognition that: “Youth culture might have remained just that—the traditional subculture of the young, a rite of passage on the route to normal adulthood—had it not been for the revolt of black youth, disrupting the American celebration in ways no one had imagined possible”. Gitlin, The Sixties, 84. It is my observation that Gitlin, who dedicated a chapter to the relation between the New Left and the various factions of Black activism, especially the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, directly credits Civil Rights with having initiated, and led by example, the entire “movement” of the 1960s. 27 Francis Frascina, “Angry Arts, the Art Workers’ Coalition and the politics of ‘otherness,’ ” in Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 112. 28 Mel Ramsden, “On Practice,” in Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writing, eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 196. 29 Lucy Lippard, “The Art Workers’ Coalition: Not a History” (1970); reprinted in Get The Message?, 14. 30 Kosuth, “1975,” 90. 31 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–186.

The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

32 Kynaston McShine, “Essay,” in Information, ed. Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 138. 33 Adrian Piper, “Three Models of Art Production Systems,” in Information, ed. McShine, 111. Reprinted in Ursula Meyer, ed., Conceptual Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), 202. 34 Adrian Piper, “Adrian Piper: Ein Blatt aus Context #7,” Displayer 01 (April 2007): 33 (my translation). 35 Unfortunately this component was stolen from inside Piper’s work while it was on display, a shameful event that in effect has damaged two works of art, depriving future audiences of both. See Adrian Piper, “Missing,” on the artist’s website, www.adrianpiper.com/art/missing.shtml. 36 Republished in Lippard, Six Years, 168. This citation is taken from an original copy collected in a binder at the APRAF. 37 In addition to the circulation of Barthes’s “Death of the Author,” it is clear that the idea of the “author god” was being eroded from inside and outside the text, with new methodologies introducing multiple alternative configurations to the place of the author within the constellation of creation, work, and reception. Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. D. F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 124. 38 As Piper explained about her choice of the term xenophobia: “I describe this reaction as racist, but in fact it is more generally xenophobic, because it is as much a response of anxiety and fear to perceived cultural differences that can be alleviated only by denying or appropriating them as it is a response of hostility or contempt to perceived racist stereotypes.” Adrian Piper, “Notes on Funk I–IV (1983–1984),” in Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume I: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968–1992 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 195–216. 39 Lawrence Alloway papers, 1935–2003, The Getty Research Institute, Research Library, Accession no. 2003.M.46. 40 In some cases the problem stemmed from misperceptions of what the psychoanalytic definition of “the subject” actually is, or from a problematic definition of the term altogether. 41 Jayne Wark, “Conceptual Art and Feminism: Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, and Martha Wilson,” Woman’s Art Journal 22, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2001): 48. 42 Wark, “Conceptual Art and Feminism,” 46. 43 The discussion was in preparation for the exhibition How Many Billboards? Art Instead, MAK Center at the Schindler House, West Hollywood, California (2010); I was visiting Asher’s studio with MAK director Kimberli Meyer. Additional cocurators were Gloria Sutton and Lisa Henry. For more information about the show see www.howmanybillboards.org/index.html. It is not my intension to criticise Asher, who was a dedicated teacher and beloved member of our art community, but to demonstrate how entrenched and persistent was the misconception that “the subject” means “the self.” 44 Mary Kelly, “Art and Sexual Politics,” in Imaging Desire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 2–10.Originally given as a paper presentation in 1977.

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45 In “Woman’s Stake: Filming the Female Body,” Mary Ann Doane raised the question of the representation of women, given that the definitions of sexual difference are bound by essentialism, and that semiotics-influenced psychoanalytic definitions of gender operate within patriarchal discourse. Since the relation between the body and the psychic process takes place in representation, it was therefore critical to film analysis. In October: The First Decade, 1976–1986, eds. Annette Michelson et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), first published in October 17 (Summer 1981): 22–36. Film theory had a significant influence on art from the 1970s, especially through Screen Magazine, with which Mary Kelly, who was living in London at the time, was involved. Kelly brought this context to the United States in the 1980s, where she influenced several generations of artists through her teaching at the Independent Studio Program at the Whitney (1989–96). 46 Mary Kelly, “Remembering, Repeating, Working Through,” in Imaging Desire, xv–xxix. Here Kelly speaks about the Equal Pay Act in the United Kingdom, passed in 1970 but not put into effect until 1975. In the United States the Equal Pay Act was signed in 1963 and was intended to abolish wage disparity based on gender, an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. 47 Luke Skrebowski, “Systems, Contexts, Relations: An Alternative Genealogy of Conceptual Art,” (PhD diss., Middlesex University, 2009), 224. 48 Juli Carson, “Re-Viewing Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document,” Documents 13 (Fall 1998): 43. 49 Helen Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work,” October 92 (Spring 2000): 71–97. Diana Fuss has challenged the binary distinction between essentialism and constructionism, laying the foundation for many of the revisionist theories that followed. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (London: Routledge, 1990). 50 Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work,” 81–82. 51 Significantly, this work and Kelly are featured in Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s theoretical film Riddles of the Sphinx (1977). 52 Carson, “Re-Viewing Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document,” 47–48. 53 Juli Carson, “Post-Partum Document: An Introduction,” in Mary Kelly: Projects, 1973–2010, ed. Dominique Heyse-Moore (Manchester: The Whitworth Art Gallery, 2010), 74–79. 54 François Regnault, “Lacan and Experience,” in Lacan and the Human Sciences, ed. Alexandre Leupin (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska, 1991), 43–58. 55 For a summary of Barthes’ semiotic analysis of the function of tropes in literature, photography, and film, see Kaja Silverman, “From Sign to Subject: A Short History,” in The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 28. 56 Benjamin Buchloh, “A Conversation with Martha Rosler,” in Martha Rosler: Positions in the Lifeworld, ed. Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 23–55. 57 Laura Cottingham, “The Inadequacy of Seeing and Believing: The Art of Martha Rosler,” in Inside the Invisible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th century Art In, Of, and From the Feminine, ed. Catherine de Zegler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 157.

The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

58 www.martharosler.net/projects/garagesale1.html. 59 Buchloh, “A Conversation with Martha Rosler,” 38. 60 For a description of its iterations and an excellent analysis, see Steve Edwards, Martha Rosler: The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (London: Afterall Books, 2012). 61 Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: New Press, 1998), 80. 62 In Buchloh, “A Conversation with Martha Rosler,” 37. 63 Allan Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” Massachusetts Review 19, no. 4 (Winter 1978): 867. 64 Martha Rosler, “In, Around and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography),” in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 191. 65 See August Jordan Davis, “Star Wars: Return of the Sixties Or, Martha Rosler versus the Empire Striking Back,” Third Text 27, no. 4 (2013): 565–578. 66 See Davis, “Star Wars”: 565–578. 67 Martha Rosler, “For an Art Against the Mythology of Everyday Life,” in Decoys and Disruptions, 8. 68 Martha Rosler, “Notes on Quotes,” in Decoys and Disruptions, 143. 69 Bruce Robbins, “Balibarism!” N+1 16 (Spring 2013), https://nplusonemag.com/ issue-16/reviews/balibarism. 70 Silvia Kolbowski, an inadequate history of conceptual art (1998–99), on artist’s website, www.silviakolbowski.com/projectDetail.cfm?ID=2. 71 For an analysis and some of the transcripts see: Silvia Kolbowski, “An Inadequate History of Conceptual Art,” October 92 (Spring 2000): 52–70. 72 Kolbowski, “An Inadequate History of Conceptual Art,” 62.

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The political referent in debate: identity, difference, representation

For what has been celebrated (and, less frequently, denounced) as a return to representation after the long night of modernist abstraction is in many instances a critique of representation, an attempt to use representation against itself to challenge its authority, its claim to poses some truth or epistemological value. (Craig Owens (1982))1

A schematic view of 1980s art and discourse can be drawn in broad strokes around two major fault lines that each split into a complex map of debates. The first divide took place between a reactionary postmodernism and various socially minded approaches. While the latter spread into a vast terrain of positions ranging from the liberal to the radical, on the first side, we saw a rise of movements such as neo-expressionism or neo-Geo, where artists returned to object-based practices and resurrected notions such as artistic genius or beauty after two decades of critical scrutiny. Created with a market-driven agenda, complicity itself was often the subject matter, as seen in the work of Julian Schnabel or Jeff Koons. The resurfacing of object-based practices coincided in the 1980s with the rapid development of art as investment (independent of buying art for enjoyment or prestige) and a historically unprecedented growth of the art market.2 We live today in the aftermath of the cultural and economic regime change characterised by such developments that can be generally called neo-liberal.3 A year after Margaret Thatcher was elected in the United Kingdom on a platform that combined cultural conservatism with market-driven economics, in the United States Ronald Reagan followed suit, ushering de-regulation, privatisation, and military expansion. Yet, while the 1980s object-based practices continue to do well on the market, the greater part of critical and historical attention to late twentieth-century art has focused on the second set of debates—those concerned with the methods of political art and the positions they reflect. This chapter focuses on the second divide, offering a specific set of distinctions made in the debates about political art in the 1980s and 1990s by observing a constellation of anthologies, symposia, and exhibitions as a

The political referent in debate

backdrop to understanding the curatorial agenda and reception of the 1993 Whitney Biennial for American Art, as well as a comprehensive examination of the exhibition contributions of Daniel Joseph Martinez, Andrea Fraser, and Lorna Simpson. The 1993 Biennial provides an ideal case study to examine the representation of socio-political issues in art, as it consolidated perspectives on two key terms for the later part of the twentieth century: identity politics and multiculturalism. As detailed in the Introduction and Chapter 1, I define identity politics and multiculturalism in the historical framework of 1960s politics and account for the institutional, not just the political or intellectual dimension of their rise as frameworks for minority opposition or participation. Identity politics developed in the 1970s largely out of the Civil Rights legacy as a means to consolidate oppressed groups into activism around a common concern, including all the radical groups that followed. Multiculturalism stemmed from institutional agendas and the discourse of the liberal nation-state. Here, a for-or-against debate gives way to understanding identity politics and multiculturalism as modes of describing a historical stage and/or a political strategy. Many artists concerned with these frameworks sought ways of showing how identities worked, not what they looked like. The feminist critique of representation was a central discourse in these debates, yet its implications were broader than to gender alone. Mary Kelly’s classification of 1970s feminist artistic strategies can also be applied to a broader set of identity-oriented practices.4 Key approaches Kelly described included: the creation of new and different images; scrutinising the operation of the gaze; infusing existing art forms with so-called feminine sensibilities; using the body in performance and video; and activating narrative for the purpose of political debate. The manifold ways in which 1970s feminist art referenced its political subject matter set the stage for the type of 1980s art that focused on the politics of representation in art, media, and popular culture, influencing work about ethnicity or race, and becoming central to the discourse on sexuality, especially during the AIDS crisis.5 Significant in this respect was the landmark exhibition “Difference: On Representation and Sexuality” (1984/85), which highlighted a set of constructivist approaches to the formation of subjectivity and the subject, underscoring the social, ideological, psychological, economic, and linguistic structures of identity over essentialist definitions reliant upon notions of inherent communality.6 Curated by Kate Linker and Jane Weinstock (film and video), it brought Lacanian psychoanalysis and semiotic investigation of gender to examine the cultural construction of gender and sexuality in the various orders of representation ranging from mass media, high art, and the discourses of photography, to the function of language as infrastructure of ideology, all of which facilitate gender-based power dynamics.

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The 1980s saw a move towards the synthesis of opposing positions. The programming at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, founded in 1977 under the direction of Marcia Tucker, deliberately staged exhibitions with conflicting methodological or thematic approaches, rather than favoring one method of artistic practice over another.7 Thus, as Juli Carson showed, feminist attitudes to art production articulated in the 1970s were put into debate by the New Museum in the 1980s. Carson compared the approach of the Heresies collective (its journal published from 1977 until 1992), which was featured in the exhibition “Classified: Big Pages from the Heresies Collective” (1983), and based on the cultural feminism of Simon de Beauvoir, Kate Millet, and Shulamit Firestone, with the model of “Difference: On Representation and Sexuality”, which was based on the feminism of the academic journal Screen, influenced by psychoanalysis and film theory, and featuring the writing of Mary Kelly, Juliet Mitchell, Laura Mulvey, and Julia Kristeva. Heresies articulated the oppression of women as a social and cultural phenomenon, while “Difference” looked for its sources in the operation of the psyche, which in turn results in oppression in “real life.” The attitude of Heresies addressed feminine subjectivity along the lines of class and the ideology of consumer culture, neglecting, according to Carson, to account for the unconscious as a force in the formulation of women’s subjectivity, and the influence of interventionist art practices on postmodern aesthetics. Conversely, “Difference” approached the construction of gender identity within language from a Lacanian perspective, such that the works were able to articulate the very terms of sexuality’s construction.8 Included in “Difference” was Silvia Kolbowski’s series Model Pleasure I–VIII 1982–1983 (1982–83) (Figures: 4.1, 4.2). A montage of found popular and mass media images and some created for the series, all enlarged to 8 × 10 in. units, juxtaposed fetishised views of women’s body parts, food, and text to highlight how manipulated representations of women produce and enhance a received vocabulary of desire. In the second part of the series, VI–VIII, Kolbowski rearranged the modules from the initial works. In Model Pleasure III, close-ups of high-heeled feet and a set of four drawings illustrating the many uses of a cheap accessory to highlight the ankle, wrist, or neck, flank a central set, where an image of a typed page reads: “There was something she carved craved; something which cost cast its spill spell upon me, while I still remaimed remained unscene unseen … 9

The sentence commences with a quotation mark, but concludes with an ellipsis, implying continuity. Verbs are crossed out, canceled yet still present, substituted by ones whose difference is only of one letter. Their similarity or difference proliferates meaning by metonymy and association over and above what the syntax may offer, evoking the methods of psychoanalytic interpretation, where

Silvia Kolbowski, Model Pleasure V (1983), image courtesy of artist. One color and seven black-and-white photographs, each 10 × 8 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Purchase, with funds from the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee and the Photography Committee.

4.1 

Silvia Kolbowski, Model Pleasure III (1983), image courtesy of artist. Three color and nine black-and-white photographs, each 10 × 8 in. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Ralph M. Parsons Fund (M.2009.22a-L).

4.2 

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meaning emerges in-between and around the speaker’s intention. Some verbs shift from strong to weak, or from a description of monetary value into that of an act upon the (woman) subject, who is consequently injured, or left behind. The subject is also switched mid-sentence, from the general to the first-person, as if the condition of all women is also that of each particular one. Here, failing to be portrayed by representation (“unscene”), or failure to have agency on the stage of life, renders the female subject invisible. Activating puns, slips of tongue, and double entendre, the text probes how pleasure is formed between the instinctual and the culturally inherited, how our somatic responses are “modeled” by the regime of images we inhabit. Depending on whether we consider “model” to be a noun or an adjective, the phrase can refer to the desires of people classified by their profession, or to a type of desire, the archetypical one, the model upon which other desires are based. Desire is shown as constituted in the image, by the image, and according to its function as a measure against which pleasure, as a consequence of signification, is gauged. Appropriation was a central technique, as in a range of work that aimed to unpack the constructed nature of desire and gender, and that manipulated found images or objects from popular culture to reveal how its coercive properties function.10 These practices extended the work of such artists as Adrian Piper, Mary Kelly and Martha Rosler that mobilised a feminist critique of patriarchy in a postmodern critique of representation and the imbrication of the visual in the power apparatus.11 The relation of representation and power was a significant question in the discussion of aesthetics and activism around the AIDS crisis, a catastrophe that escalated exponentially throughout the 1980s, yet that the government malevolently ignored.12 In AIDS: Cultural Analysis/ Cultural Activism, a pioneering issue for queer theory published in October in 1987, editor Douglas Crimp worked against the notion that there were only two ways to respond to the AIDS crisis, either fundraising for science or expressions of suffering and loss. Crimp sought an alternative in activism, where visual representation in video, television, and graphics was a major channel for information, as communication about disease prevention and care was systematically ignored by all governmental agencies: From the beginning my intention was to show, through discussion of these works, that there was a critical, theoretical, activist alternative to the personal, elegiac expressions that appeared to dominate the art-world response to AIDS. What seemed to me essential was a vastly expanded view of culture in relation to crisis. But the full extent to which this view would have to be expanded only became clear through further engagement with the issues. AIDS intersects with and requires a critical rethinking of all of culture: of language and representation, of science and medicine, of health and illness, of sex and death, of the public

The political referent in debate

and private realm. AIDS is a central issue for gay men, of course, but also for lesbians. AIDS is an issue for women generally, but especially for poor and minority women, for child-bearing women, for women working in the health care system. AIDS is an issue for drug users, for prisoners, for sex workers.13

AIDS brought a queer constituency in contact with other communities that had been affected by the disease such as racial minorities and/or the poor, sex workers, and recipients of blood transfusions, thrust into the universality of a shared crisis handled by grass-roots coalitions and organisations.14 Between November 20, 1987 and January 24, 1988, the New Museum exhibited, at the invitation of curator William Olander, Let the Record Show …, an installation by ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in the museum’s “store-front” window facing Broadway. Including the neon sign spelling “Silence=Death” that became iconic, and information about the crisis, the organisers aimed to inform the public about unpublished statistics and the political context of apathy and misinformation about the epidemic, and to protest the circulation of stereotyping images.15 ACT UP, and its graphic arm, the artist collective Gran Fury, activated graphic strategies as a vehicle of protest and education using public surfaces ranging from posters, bus advertisements, flyers, letter writing campaigns, video, to public protest. It was a new intersection of art and politics that has deeply impacted how both were practiced.16 In addition to supporting experimental forms and “difficult” art, the New Museum intervened into the discourse with a series of lasting publications. The anthology Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (1990) emphasised the influence of British and American cultural studies and impacted a generation of artists.17 Speaking to a heteronormative Western hegemony, most of the authors highlighted the paradox where a compensatory thrust of multiculturalism resulted in its rigidity as a framework, where the definition of a culture as marginal sustained its condition as such, or where, as Rosalyn Deutsche showed in “Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City,” the term “public art” was manipulated to serve several sets of conflicting interests. Beyond the framework of high art, multiple cultural forms were considered, such that the histories of video and performance art of the 1970s were brought into perspectives ranging from a focus on the relationship of all cultures to the media, to forms such as hip-hop, street, or club culture. It included the watershed essay by Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference” (1990), to which I will return later.18 Another significant example in this map of events was “The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s” (1990) a collaboration between the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, surveying political tendencies in art of the previous decade.19 The exhibition evidenced that many of the artists

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considered identity to be a slippery term, rather than a stable marker of identity, showcasing the pluralism of the 1980s art world, emphasising multicultural interests, critiquing definitions of a margin that relied on a binary relation to the concept of center, and debating essentialist notions of identity. These perspectives were outlined in Laura Trippi and Gary Sangster’s catalogue entry, “From Trivial Pursuit to the Art of the Deal: Art Making in the Eighties,” a review of art publications and projects demonstrating how notions of identity were persistently questioned in the art of the 1980s, and emphasising how, like language, identity is constructed through differences measured by race, gender, or class distinction. The article suggested that since the self was understood by contemporaneous artists to be established through a constructed vocabulary, artists identified cultural values as formed through (or in relation to) conventions. The curators claimed that: “The issue of access—or of its obstruction—to positions from which the ‘I’ might legitimately speak, was the link connecting artists engaged in the critique of representation to those whose primary focus had fallen on the institutions that orchestrate and legitimate ‘identity’.”20 What they identified as a “pursuit of the trivial” was seen as an anti-essentialist gesture, undoing hierarchies established in modernism. In Essentially Speaking Diana Fuss questioned the distinction of essentialism from constructionism, demonstrating the inability to positively separate the two categories.21 That we look at essences as social constructions does not alter realities of subordination, exclusion, and other problems women and other marginalised groups face, Fuss argued, as social and cultural conditions remain hierarchical even if the core and operation of these conditions has been exposed. She traced the definition of essence in Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction. In their criticism of the Enlightenment movement and its reliance on notions of human reason, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida laid the groundwork to understand the mechanisms of patriarchy and their consequential societal function. Despite the fact that Freudian psychoanalysis articulated gender as a constructed identity, it was nevertheless a model that privileged the patriarchal, even if merely as a signifier. Following Freud, Lacan’s insight that the Oedipus complex is not a “natural” process, but rather is implied by a social construct, was a major contribution to constructionism. From the Lacanian perspective, the formulation of gender occurs in the realm of language and therefore is not determined by biological essence. Nevertheless, the metonymic relationship between the Phallus as a signifier and the Penis as an organ is maintained. Thus, the historical consequences and realities of essentialism linger, as the world continues to live by essentialist law. In his critique of binary opposition, Derrida used his neologism différance to define the category of “woman” as well as other forms of binary oppositions.

The political referent in debate

From speaking about the “undecidability” of a woman’s place to his attempt to make the claim that “woman does not exist,” Derrida neglected the fact that in reality social ramifications of binary opposition still take their toll. Thus Fuss: My position here is that the possibility of any radical constructionism can only be built on the foundations of a hidden essentialism. Derrida would, of course, be quick to agree that despite the dislocating effects of deconstruction’s strategies of reversal/displacement we can never get beyond metaphysics, and therefore, since all of Western metaphysics is predicated upon Aristotle’s essence/accident distinction, we can never truly get beyond essentialism.22

The distinction between constructionism and essentialism echoes the principal divisions between the analytic and the synthetic approach to art. If the synthetic points to particular social conditions, communities, or identities, it does so precisely in order to erode the categories they rely upon, commencing with unpacking their operation, but recognising their lingering effects. The rest of the catalogue reflected on how identity politics was affected by its context, so yielding a critical art practice that challenged the authority of the artist, the institution, and the object of art. The influence of Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology was evident throughout. In “Taking Control: Art and Activism,” David Deitcher warned about the sophisticated ways conservatives employed the media to persuade public opinion on matters such as funding for the arts, leaving behind the Left, whose critical stance towards these tools was potentially detrimental.23 Essayists called into question the binary notion of margin versus centre, as seen in the influence of club culture and queer theatre on performance art. The work and the catalogue essays challenged demands placed on minority artists to fit into particular typologies of practice.24 Jimmie Durham, for example, demonstrated the communication breakdown on two sides of a cultural misunderstanding. Activist and political hubs of resistance were considered in the legacy of the 1960–70s protest movements. Marcia Tucker’s notes from the preparations of “The Decade Show” reveal a range of definitions of the term “identity.”25 As in many of the New Museum shows, Tucker involved artists in the planning phases of projects, engaging an artist advisory council during the early stages of the discussion to weigh in on the exhibition concepts. One of the meeting’s minutes lists the participants: Emilio Cruz, Josely Carvalho, Barbara Kruger, Al Loving, Keith Morrison, Rafael Montañez Ortiz, Adrian Piper, Yvonne Rainer, Alison Saar, Juan Sanchez, and Judite dos Santos. Their discussion underscored that identity is determined from outside, that race and gender are always named, and that the mainstream advocates singular terms such as woman, gay, or black, to determine identity. As one of the participants remarked: “no single factor may be determinant

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of one’s identity,” and “the mainstream promotes the idea of one thing.” While some of the participants emphasised this constructed nature of identity in its definitions and uses advocated by mainstream culture, there were also voices that spoke about the formulation of communities and the necessity of collective identity for the sake of social change. In many ways their discussion confirmed Fuss’s analysis in lived, situated knowledge. The discussions also addressed what constituted an appropriate point of view, who the audience consisted of, what the goals of the show were, how to frame the 1980s, or how to combine different or contradictory ideas. Dialog also revolved around the stakes of who it is that has the power to define identity, the troubles with over-determination, and the need for identity as a mode of consolidating action. Full identification with essential identity definitions existed, but mostly a range of modes questioned its function, with a clear emphasis on the relation of identity-based issues to the shift in the political economy that the United States was undergoing. Included in “The Decade Show” was Mass (1986), a traveling exhibition assembled by the collective Group Material to spell the word “mass” using almost two hundred 1 square foot artworks by different artists.26 The work referenced a formal term whose metaphorical use to describe large quantities of people has became common (mass market or media, or the masses), also connoting the potential of political power. Active from 1979–96 with fluctuating membership and size (with Julie Ault, Mundy McLaughlin, Tim Rollins, and Doug Ashford representing the core group) the group adopted the format of the exhibition as their artistic media, curating a variety of shows throughout the 1980s, juxtaposing visual culture from spheres ranging from high art to folklore and to mass culture, and engaging a variety of audiences and venues.27 Group Material’s practice represents the way in which the focus on social issues took the strategies of institutional critique as a mode to circumvent the rising market as the only means and criterion for the quality of art. It is within this context that the 1993 Whitney Biennial made its statement. The 1993 Whitney Biennial: a case study

Analysis of an exhibition allows a comparison between the visual, textual, curatorial, and administrative modes of speech that operate simultaneously around such an event. Its implications appear in the gaps between the interpretation of the art, its institutional framing, and its reception by critics and art historians.28 The general role of a biennial is to assess previous years of activity, present the zeitgeist, and engage new publics with the complexity of contemporary art. Unique about the 1993 Whitney Biennial was that it offered a coherent point of view on the preoccupation with identity and multiculturalism

The political referent in debate

in the American context. Judging by the amount of response and on-going interest that the 1993 iteration has generated, it is safe to state that it is the most important Whitney exhibition to date.29 It showcased recent developments in art that were formed as both a critique of and homage to identity politics and institutional critique. Supporters praised the Biennial’s social engagement and what they perceived as a resistance to the growing commodification of art.30 But the perceived notion that political art is anti-commercial was a distraction, as Jennie Klein has distinguished. The exhibition’s contribution was not rendered through negation, but by negotiation: While the Biennial was guilty (to some extent) of jumping on the multicultural bandwagon only after it was clear that the politics of Postmodernity had opened a space for a difference other than différance, curator Elisabeth Sussman at least made a genuine attempt to select artists whose work explores questions of the construction of identity within the messily overlapping categories of gender, race, ethnicity and class.31

Detractors overwhelmed the exhibition’s reception, ranging from those who objected to the display’s confrontational aesthetic, to conservatives who opposed political art in principle. David Rimanelli’s description for Artforum gave a sense of the exhibition’s atmosphere: “With interactive video and installations coming at you like so many freight trains, this Biennial exhibition is oddly reminiscent of the Boston Museum of Science, but less informative.”32 Roger Kimball’s response in the National Review crystallised the traditionalist attitude to what the Biennial stood for: You can see the same loathsome objects and performances in fashionable galleries and on college campuses across the country; you can read the same turgid proclamations in academic journals and museum catalogues everywhere. The wacko feminism, the preening ethnic narcissism, the rejection of artistic standards, the naïve recapitulation of radical clichés about race, gender, class, “power,” “the West”: it’s all here, stuffed in unlovely profusion into every nook and cranny of the Whitney’s exhibition space.33

Reflecting back on the exhibition in 2005, Elisabeth Sussman recalled the political climate in 1993. With the commencement of the Clinton administration in January, and the World Trade Center bombing of February 1993 as the backdrop to the Biennial, Sussman was perplexed by the failure of journalists and art critics to understand the urgency of political art. Revisiting the exhibition, she responded to Peter Plagens’s criticism in Newsweek, in which he negatively characterised Biennial work as academic political art: “Whatever his complaints were about the Biennial, it continues to interest me that Plagens never imagines or connected that what was going on in the galleries

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of the Whitney bore even the remotest relationship to the world reported in the pages of the magazine that precede his review.”34 Sussman explained the curatorial intention to consolidate artworks concerned with actual political situations, which, for example, ask what constitutes a community, or examine its relationship to identity formation. These concerns, she explained, were particularly relevant when, on the heels of the failed conspiracy to bring down the Twin Towers, the loyalty of Arab-American citizens was being called into question.35 I focus here specifically on the response to the Biennial in intellectual circles, as these heated methodological debates about attitudes towards political art are what ultimately verified its significance and ensured its longevity as a coherent curatorial statement, despite, and perhaps because of, the animosity it had solicited at the time.36 These debates nested within a broader set of academic dialogues between the established disciplines and the new gender, ethnic, race, cultural, visual, or media studies. Headed by Elisabeth Sussman and including Thelma Golden, John G. Hanhardt, Lisa Phillips and a performance section by Jeanette Vuocolo, the exhibition responded to recent events, which included the escalation of the AIDS crisis, “the NEA debates,” the Culture Wars, the Los Angeles riots, and the wave of protests against the Columbus Quincentennial, all defined by identity politics. In her catalogue entry, “Coming Together in Parts: Positive Power in the Art of the Nineties,” Sussman emphasised the interrelations of class, gender, and cultural and national identities within the complexities of contemporary social homogeneity; and how the art in the exhibition aimed to question essentialist notions of community as a clearly demarcated, stable entity. She defined three criteria for selecting artworks: a focus on ideas without neglecting artistic and formal concerns; the understanding that definitions of identity are in constant flux; and the attempt to redefine the art world in relation to a larger social reality with an emphasis on diversity and difference. In addition she emphasised that the show was marked by a wide variety of methods rather than a single school or approach, and also by a focus on the human body as subject matter. However, Left-leaning intellectual circles were still associating identity politics with naïve subjectivism that relied on autobiography and narrative strategies of expression. There was also a general agreement that identity politics were fragmenting the Left, that special interest groups were vulnerable to complicity with the capitalistic liberal nation state system, or that they employed essentialist concepts of community. These positions were formed against the 1980s multicultural wave of celebratory scholarly and curatorial projects that tended to focus on particular identities. In an interview with Michele Wallace, Jim Drobnick asked whether

The political referent in debate

she saw multiculturalism as an academic or bourgeois phenomenon. Wallace answered: I do [see it as both]. It would have to be. For the most part, anything originating from a white perspective that uses the same kind of knowledge to look at African Americans, as well as Koreans or Puerto Ricans in this country, without an acknowledgment of class, gender, how long they have been here, whether their immigration was illegal or legal, I have to call profoundly antihistorical and antimaterialist, and probably racist to boot. I’m not opposed to theorizing multiculturalism. It just can’t be a program like primitivism. If mostly white people talk about it, as when mostly white people talked about primitivism, it will subjugate rather than benefit the people inscribed within that framework. If it’s a program that museums and institutions use to appropriate the vitality of the nonwhite world, then it’s bad news. It can only be useful if it is an opportunity to theorize the multiple theoretical positions of minorities in first world countries and the problems of third world peoples in third world countries.37

It was as the latter, as a theorisation of nuanced and complex phenomena, that the Biennial addressed identity politics. It juxtaposed multiple attitudes towards identity’s formation, highlighting the existence of a cross-identity politics, as in the influence of Black Power on the feminist and gay liberation movements. Firstly, it made an art historical claim by showcasing the synthesis of historical movements that were considered disparate, and by highlighting artists whose practice brought identity politics to bear on institutional critique and conceptual art. Secondly, propelled by the institutionalisation of critical and site-responsive art, it was an experiment in self-conscious curatorial practice, which attempted to render a degree of transparency into the operations of the institution, by including work that criticised the institution, by taking cues from the critical attitude manifested in the artworks, and by openly discussing curatorial intentions in their catalogue entries. The catalogue essays and curatorial concerns of the Biennial demonstrated the influence of British and American cultural studies, most notably Stuart Hall’s work on the politics of representation and Cornel West’s notion of “The New Cultural Politics of Difference” (a widely influential essay in the arts and humanities, which was reprinted several times in the early 1990s), as well as poststructuralist and postmodern theories ranging from Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s minor literature to Judith Butler’s and Julia Kristeva’s theories of gender. Sussman introduced the exhibition’s focus on social realities based on non-essentialist identity politics that both emphasise class and address formal concerns. Golden and Hanhardt both focused on the decentering of cultural hegemony through various oppositional and revisionist means, emphasising the influence of conceptualist strategies.

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In her essay “What’s White …?” Thelma Golden described artworks that defined difference not through its relation to a coherent “white” center of power.38 “Many of the artists in the ‘1993 Biennial Exhibition’ work consciously to deconstruct and de-center the politically constructed site of whiteness and its relation to the ever-changing definition of Americanness.”39 Golden emphasised that much of the work in the exhibition was concerned with what West defined as “the cultural politics of difference.” In his essay, West traced the genealogies of thinking represented in the positions of the Biennial artists and its curatorial perspective. West articulated the new cultural politics of difference as neither oppositional nor transgressive (in the avant-garde sense of having intent to shock), but rather as an association of the cultural producers with the marginalised, contextualising his argument within the end of “the age of Europe” and the rise of the United States as a world power. He saw the three challenges of the new cultural politics of difference as: the intellectual question of methodology, the existential question of resources, and the political challenge of how alliances between marginalised groups should be formed. He summarised the development of black resistance to its representation by white society while challenging the assumptions these arguments were based upon, especially essentialist notions of black subjectivity and community. Cultural production that is ultimately acknowledged through the institution was therefore a part of it because co-option, to a certain extent, will always tame the work, which according to him was not always necessarily a negative outcome. What characterised this form of cultural production was its location both in mainstream institutions and on the outside as one of the main strategies employed in the critique of institutional ideology or hegemony. In the Biennial this shift manifested in the tendency to see art as a component of a culture, with the inclusion of the George Holliday video of the Rodney King beating; and the visible impact of media, hip-hop, street, or club cultures on Biennial artists. Multiple artists influenced by institutional critique were also included, many of which used the apparatus of the museum itself to point to historical or systematic institutional exclusions. In what follows, detailed analysis of three such artworks demonstrates the ways in which their critique of the institution undermined its history of exclusion based on high versus low culture, an exclusion based on class, itself intertwined with race and gender discrimination. The intent of these interventions was, along the lines that West articulated, neither naively subversive nor deliberately shrill; instead it located itself on various boundaries and thresholds of the institution, choosing such sites as the educational component that aims to “interpret” the art, or the administrative side that controls the public. Instead of resistance, new cultural producers utilised a critique that made visible the power dynamics of cultural contexts. Despite art’s alliances with the power

The political referent in debate

structure and therefore its potential to be co-opted, West determined that as long as cultural production was realised within cultural institutions and continued to operate alongside social activism, it was of value. Even though art’s mode of cultural production used the language of the power apparatus, it nevertheless critiqued traditional canons and cultural hierarchies. West listed some of the major influences on the contemporary version of political cultural production, first tracing the new politics of difference to Matthew Arnold’s vision of secular democracies where subjects are united through culture; to Marxism, postcolonial theories, cultural studies, and poststructuralist theory; the impact of revisionist history by marginalised groups; and the predominance of popular culture. Working with what Stuart Hall termed the “politics of representation,” he mostly addressed the new cultural producers of black culture.40 The goals were not to produce positive images or fight racial stereotypes seen in popular culture, but rather to interrogate the political construction of the concept of “whiteness,” asking how was it that the center came to be, and as such, how to define the margin. The new cultural producers intervened into representation by questioning the structures of identity formation. As Stuart Hall insisted, the proliferation of diverse subjectivities, experiences, and social relations that exist under a single signifier such as “black” demand its examination in the broader field of representation because: “This gives questions of culture and ideology, and the scenarios of representation—subjectivity, identity, politics—a formative, not merely an expressive, place in the constitution of social and political life.”41 According to Golden, the artwork in the Biennial performed in visual art what West advocated in the world of theoretical writing and literature. Stemming from practices rooted in social activism, the artwork did more than represent coherent and narrowly defined identities. By redefining difference, Golden continued, the artworks in the exhibition moved beyond essentialist definitions of identity.42 The redefinition started in outlining identity not as a subset of dominant culture but as existing beyond the paradigms of marginality and centrality. She acknowledged that the recognition of historical center, or canon, could no longer significantly define the margins, because any definition of the margin implicitly implicates hierarchy. The specific positions that once constituted the margin were instead presented in their complexity, in relation to new formulations and delineations of communities. Many of the artworks selected by the curators did not engage identity as a given but rather as a position that is distinct from subjectivity. In hindsight we can discern a definition of identity as the conscious part of subjectivity, its visible aspect reflected in the ways that the subject is defined through language, culture, ideology, the perception of the other, etc. A large number of Biennial artists treated identity as the locus of agency, something akin to the conscious part of subjectivity, an interface for the subject.

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The term agency refers to the ability of actors to act, or to take action. It also refers to forces exerted, thus that ideology is a form of agency, for its ability to influence the thinking and behavior of subjects. The psychoanalyst Frances Moran aimed to conceptualise the distribution of pressures that help individuals form the notion of the “self ” under shifting frameworks, drawing the distinction: “the term subject refers specifically to the individual who speaks to the analyst, and the term agency to the notion of the determination or control of thoughts, words, and actions.”43 In Freud Moran found the contradictory movement of repression and subjectivity: Psychoanalytic experience teaches us that the speaker unawaredly speaks another discourse, the discourse of the unconscious—one that is embedded within the conscious discourse and so available to the analyst’s ear. If the speaker is unaware of this discourse, if it is not intended yet nevertheless has a meaning within the context of his or her life story, who then can be said to be the subject of such speech? Who is the agent of this conscious discourse, and who is the agent of the discourse of the unconscious? Are we to postulate the possibility of two subjects? […] Agency is attributed, therefore, to both a pull and a push; but who exerts these forces, and why, remains undisclosed. Although Freud acknowledges that repression acts in a highly individual manner, the assumption is that it does act rather than that the individual actively represses. It does not seem to be a case of “either-or” but rather a case of “and”—that is, that the subject is repressed and that the subject represses.44

Lacan, Moran continued, divides the inherently split subject from agency, as two separate categories, where the subject is constituted by the language of the symbolic order. It can be said, in simple terms, that one’s sense of self, one’s “individuality,” is held in the tension between the subjugation of the subject to the matrix of language and law, and agency as the loci of action and choice. Identity, as the interface between subject and agency, was therefore not a synonym for “self,” but rather a site where the overlapping concepts of self and subjectivity were momentarily suspended, in order to speculatively examine how they function, or to demonstrate how as categories they relate to the formulation of knowledge through conscious identification with a given nomenclature of identity. Through the art, the curatorial essays, and the cultural field it associated itself with, the 1993 Biennial exposed how modes of identification inflect use of language and vice versa. Use of language was therefore examined in circulation and not as an abstract study. The exhibition’s “politics of the signified,” its focus on the political referent, was a deliberate extension of the politics of syntax, tone, trope and style, a scholarly perspective developed in the disciplinary intervention of cultural studies, as seen in the work of Hall, Kobena Mercer, or Dick Hebdige.

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Between the 1960s and the 1990s the changes effected by the politics of identity and the reception of institutional critique had impacted first artistic production, and then gradually, academic and institutional attitudes. One major contribution of the 1993 Biennial was that it consolidated the reception and legacies of these practices. By 1993 critique of the institution had established itself as a major attitude to artmaking, influencing the practices of Biennial participants such as Fred Wilson, Zoe Leonard, and Andrea Fraser, who extended the structural analysis and critique of the economy of the art object of the 1960s and 1970s to examine how institutional ideology reflected the social regimes of gender, sexuality, race, and class.45 Describing Fred Wilson’s practice as “conceptual materialism,” Jennifer González identified the shift that occurred in the 1980s with the influence of postcolonial discourses on museum practices and with the quest of minorities for self-representation and the repatriation of plundered objects: “The critical appraisal of the institution of the museum in the fine arts was in many respects a familiar project that was given a new spin in the 1980s through the merging of political activism with conceptual art’s earlier rejection of the institutional ‘frame’ of the museum in the 1960s and 1970s.”46 This attitude of a critical identity politics is one of the most significant developments in artmaking between the 1960s and the 1990s, and is central our understanding of contemporary art.47 Showcased at the Biennial, it brought a broad range of conceptual-based deconstructive and analytical approaches to bear on the question of identity as a philosophical problem and not as a position from which one speaks. Biennial artists such as Jimmie Durham, Simon Leung, Glenn Ligon, and Janine Antoni, to name a few other key figures, addressed issues of identity, but not as a means of self-representation. They regarded the museum as a structure within which identity is constituted through a matrix of identifications. As Amelia Jones wrote: While Ligon’s work clearly has its roots in 1980s appropriation art and feminist strategies of exploring identification in the visual field, and to some degree functions through binary categories, by addressing multiple and conflicting aspects of subjecthood and desire it also stages a space of opening that begins to point art discourses and practices towards considerations of identification rather than to fixed notions of categories and identities.48

Indeed, many of the Biennial artists analysed the operation of identification as the means by which subjects position themselves on the social map. Daniel J. Martinez and Andrea Fraser were concerned with how institutions relate to the public and/or the “popular,” examining historical or thematic connections between popular culture, identity politics, and the idea of “the public,” which was gaining currency at the time.49 Their production deliberately distinguished between how “the public” became a rhetorical category for

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policy and administration, and what it meant for art to become popular or interact with the broader field of mass culture. As such, their work showed how personal identity intersects with the “identity” of the museum, the ways in which it operates on a personal and institutional level. Having witnessed the art market boom in the 1980s and its direct relation to the transition of museums from a public institutional structure to a corporate one, they also responded to how this new economy impacted their field and its criteria of valuation.50 Andrea Fraser: the identification of the institution

For her contribution Untitled (1992–93), Fraser interviewed the director David Ross, the curatorial team, and curator of education Constance Wolf, and then edited the tapes to formulate an exhibition audio-guide, which was distributed from a specifically designed kiosk.51 The guide itself was a montage of anonymous interview fragments, presenting a picture of the institution’s attitude towards the public from the official to the emotional, and, as Fraser’s artwork showed, borderline hysterical.52 Yet the point of the piece was not to indict the interviewees. In consolidating states of mind expressed backstage, the work functioned as an analysis of how the institution “thinks” or “feels”. If the lengthy interview material from which Fraser excerpted ranged in its staging and line of questioning between a mock sociology and investigative reporting, the final outcome—the audio-guide—resembled a mockumentary.53 It thus did not attempt to provide the audience with the “truth” of the institution, but rather offered up a comedy of uncertainties where value and meaning are determined by various factors, few of which are objective. The audio-guide began with an official-sounding introduction (in Fraser’s own voice), punctuated by a curator realising that the piece would be: “Oh! Like Philippe de Montebello …,” whose deep voice had famously given the Metropolitan Museum’s audio-guide its monumental authority. With its joking exclamation “Oh good, that’s exactly who I want to be: Philippe!,” this fragment introduced the guide’s concern with institutionalised hierarchies, and how those were established and sustained through the process of identification. The curator’s amusing remark about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s legendary director highlighted the relativity of power and position, even as it was unclear if she was being sincere or ironic. The inability to distinguish between the genuine and the inflected became one of the strongest aspects of Fraser’s contribution. Animating how subjectivity is defined through sliding systems of snobbism was satirical, but the fact that criteria for determining the significance of an artwork were dependent on varying sets of hierarchal thinking was also a concrete outcome.

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Fraser then directed the audience to begin the tour at the sound of the “beep” that, pronounced using her voice and not a mechanical beep, was a flat reminder that the guide was not the regular service it was commenting upon. Her edits effected metonymic skids, where meanings of terms became junctions to switch the context of the discussion. For example, a montage concerned with the significance of reading wall texts transitioned into comments about reading in general, probing the relation of class and education. In her preliminary interviews Fraser’s questions concentrated mostly on the issue of “the public.” This, Fraser explains, was a response to the emphasis on reception that emerged in the 1980s, when quantitative analysis became a form of capital for museums to gain institutional legitimacy.54 Consequently, much of the audio-guide consisted of the curators speculating about the viewer. For the audience, listening to exhibition organisers cogitate about what visitors may need in order to understand art and what it is that they may experience might have functioned as a distancing device; the organisers were possibly perceived as compassionate, aloof, condescending, or perhaps plain annoying. Whatever the response, the work highlighted visitor reception and the concern of the curators with their audience, suturing the viewer into the apparatus of the exhibition as part of the work. Later in the guide, focus on the architecture led to a discussion of the street, whether the Whitney had “walk-ins,” why people came, and what a “general audience” may mean. Used repeatedly throughout this section, the terms ‘ “inside” and “outside” accumulated every possible meaning (literal and metaphorical) especially in relation to issues of class and access. As the work progressed, the conversation turned more and more to the curators: their wants, needs, or self-image, described through their relation to their (imagined) viewers, the institution, the artists, and the art. Fraser distanced the work to some extent from the interviewed individuals, using editing and other formal devices to highlight the guide’s artificiality. It nevertheless probed the question of institutional elitism, as the topic of privilege became increasingly foregrounded. Discussions of educational background, opera, shopping, and vacations were intertwined with discussion of art-world exclusions, their sequence suggesting a relation to the selection criteria of the Biennial. Including proclamations such as “it’s all about intimidation” followed by shrill laughter, or “social anxiety comes to play into the experience you have with the work of art,” the work, rather than simply identifying the curators with the wielding power of the institution, complicated the position of the curators. On the one hand, it positioned curating at the crossroads of privilege and cultural influence, and on the other, as a professional activity determined by several coordinates of identification. Since curatorial work has lasting impact on the (price) value and meaning of art, the artist

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highlighted the significance of the curators’ cultural identifications as a way to demarcate class identity. Fraser’s montage exposed something close to the “subjectivity” of the institution, begging the question: with whom does the institution identify—its wealthy patrons or the public? Daniel Joseph Martinez: the economy of identification

Daniel Joseph Martinez also probed how the public was determined in terms of both race and class. In Study for Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture) or Overture con Claque—Overture with Hired Audience Members (1993), Martinez replaced the Whitney’s color-coded museum admission buttons that usually spell the institutional acronym, WMAA, with fragments of a sentence as follows: “I CAN’T/ IMAGINE/ EVER WANTING/ TO BE/ WHITE”, as well as a button including the entire sentence (Figures 4.3–4.6).

4.3 

Daniel Joseph Martinez, Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture) or Overture con Claque—Overture with Hired Audience Members, 1993. Paint and enamel on metal, 12 × 15 in. (30.48 × 38.1 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California.

The political referent in debate

Reactions to this work were, to say the least, intense. On the pages of Artforum Glenn O’Brien wrote: “No fucking way was I going to put that on,” and followed it with a discussion of his white male identity.55 But reading the work literally should have been an obvious trap, “trick and subterfuge,” as Martinez remarked.56 The tags were not meant to have one addressee, but rather functioned to spatialise the viewer’s mechanism of identification, to place on display the role of identification as such. By the 1990s ambitious projects such as Adrian Piper’s Mythic Being (1972–75) and Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–79) had carefully and deliberately reconfigured the use of the term “I” to exhibit its function as shifter and its use of identity as case study—something to be insulated and examined. Subjecting the audience to activate a sentence in this way was a quintessential Duchampian tactic. Amplifying the aesthetics of institutional critique through that of political protest, the work was positioned at the crux of class hierarchies, historical institutional exclusion, and the contemporaneous permutation in which identification sustains the order of things.57 Martinez located the artwork at the site where the institution regulates its public, between the museum’s liberal façade and its financial dependency on an elite class or its underlying historical structure as a reform institution in service of hierarchical indoctrination. The first impulse of the work was economic—Martinez was giving the viewer a work of art for the price of museum admission.58 The distribution of art objects outside the circuit of collecting, even if symbolic, was a response to the escalating commodification of art and its effect on public institutions.59 The project interjected the question of racial identification where the public meets the museum: at the admissions box. The work linked the coordinates that position subjects as effects of language within the social matrix of economic exchange. As Martinez noted: “from the moment the viewer enters the museum, the admissions clerk is already editorializing—making decisions along social, racial, class and appearance lines,”60 and as he later elaborated: “it really doesn’t matter, nor do we know, whether those decisions were conscious or unconscious.”61 The interlocking economies of human relations, services, and object exchange were encapsulated in every transaction. Spatialised, the interaction of the viewer with their assigned signifier had become not only their own affair but also an event to be witnessed by others; identification itself was in effect “put on display.” Separating the word/letter “I” from the speaking subject, identification was isolated and exhibited as a mechanism dependent upon systems of communication and evaluation. A bird’s eye view of the admissions box reveals the primary role Martinez assigned to this transaction (Figure 4.4).Taken by the Whitney’s photographer at Martinez’s request, images of the buttons in circulation reveal how visitors activated the tags through a range of tropes. They demonstrate how the work

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4.4 

Daniel Joseph Martinez, Study for Museum Tags. Second Movement (Overture) or Overture con Claque—Overture with Hired Audience Members, installation view, 1993. Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California.

destabilised the possibility of fixing meaning for any section of the statement, and emphasised the signifier’s dependence on social context. One can see for example the button IMAGINE donned by a woman wearing a T-shirt saying (Figure 4.5) “make me hard,” creating a sentence that turned the T-shirt as statement to a proclamation challenging interlocutors to rethink gender and sexuality assumptions. The word WHITE on a Caucasian boy underscored how being subjected to language has varying degrees of precipitation linked to the subject’s place within a sliding scale of privilege. The multiple options by which the signifier or the signified came alive proliferated rather than narrowed down the possibilities of naming identity. A case in point: museum guards had asked Whitney director David Ross if they could participate as well. Wearing more than one tag, a guard arranged the signifiers to create multiple meanings (Figure 4.6).

The political referent in debate

Daniel Joseph Martinez, Studies for Museum Tags. Second Movement (Overture) or Overture con Claque—Overture with Hired Audience Members, installation view, 1993. Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California.

The exhibition was challenged in “The Politics of the Signifier,” a roundtable organised by October journal, which criticised not the Biennial’s political agenda, but a tendency to identify the site of the political in content rather than in media, materials or forms, characterised by Hal Foster as: “a certain turn away from questions of representation to iconographies of content; a certain turn from a politics of the signifier to a politics of the signified.”62 According to Foster, Biennial artists erroneously sited the location of the political as content external to form, which subsequently returned as autobiography: What disturbed me is that the project of the art is often to critique identity, but the subject is almost always presumed, either as the subject that addresses or the subject to be addressed, or both. So there is a turn to autobiographical identity often in the very moment of its questioning (I see this in critical theory too). How productive a paradox is this?63

In fact, a large number of Biennial artists turned to the autobiographical or the narrative not as a mark of authenticity, but precisely as a means by which to analyse agency within the system of art and meaning, culture as knowledge, and the museum as a space of social interstice where various economies

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(monetary/social) overlap. Nevertheless, the critique in October came to dominate the way the Biennial has been remembered within the field of art history. For many artists, however, the fact that identity is constructed was a given. Strategic recuperation of identity was used to pose questions regarding identity as agency or as subjectivation (assujettissement). A term defined and redefined by Michel Foucault throughout his career, subjectivation was addressed by Hall, as well as Butler and Jacques Rancière, who articulated the individual’s subjection to discursive formations.64 Whether standing in for the voice of the researcher/artist or the artist’s interface with the world as a representative figure, the first person “I” was presented as a factor within a system.65 In 1994 Renée Green, whose 1992 installation Import/Export Funk Office was included in the Biennial, organised a symposium titled Negotiations in the Contact Zone that examined the role of the subject and academic disciplines in the context of cross-cultural exchange.66 Referring specifically to the October panel and their dismissal of the artistic strategies that call into question the position of the speaking subject, Green responded: Because in that discussion the idea that “these” people who were showing in this exhibition, the 1993 Whitney Biennial, might have some acquaintance with these European, Anglo and Anglo-American post-structural theories, and that they might be aware of the process of historicizing experience wasn’t probed. That these artists might think of the “I” as something slippery seemed beyond possibility, at least that was my reading of the discussion and I found this lack of comprehension incredibly disturbing at that time.67

Martinez specifically cites Saussure’s emphasis on the arbitrary nature of the sign as what led him to abstract the idea of a racial signifier from the speaking “I” and from a particular living body. He also brought into play Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole (between language as an entire system and speech as an instance, an act). When he sent his artwork to circulate among the public to mediate human interaction, it could be said that Martinez activated his signifiers in the field of parole, within the infinite permutations of language in use. One of Saussure’s most important observations was that in langue the relation of “sound-image” to concept is arbitrary, and meaning is made by social agreement upon their relation. But in parole the relation of sign is also pending on the interlocutor. It is thus not the politics of the signified that were addressed by Martinez, but rather the circulation of the sign in parole. Saussure referred to the inaccuracy of parole derogatorily as “seeds of change.” But it was precisely the untidy application of abstracted structuralism in situated knowledge that Martinez was after, destabilising the function of textual racial signifiers. Martinez’s semiotics of social space had been influenced by the contribution of cultural studies, which sought to implement theory in practice.

The political referent in debate

In her 1996 “Welcome to the Cultural Revolution,” Rosalind Krauss analysed how cultural studies misread Lacan’s emphasis on the signifier’s linguistic (rather than pictorial) dimension, and, citing Joan Copjec’s claims for film theory, argued that cultural studies wrongly mapped the discourse of identification onto that of interpellation.68 In contrast, I would argue, that it is precisely the distinction between identification as a subjective operation, where subjects recognise themselves, and interpellation as objective when subjects are being hailed by the other, i.e. objectified, that critical identity artists where after. Moreover, as Krauss also noted, following Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Lacan himself had submitted the Saussurian sign to “treatment,” essentially transforming its function to that of an algorithm.69 If one takes into account that the evolution of thought is a history of such treatments, or even of misreading, the question begged is how to determine which treatment is a contribution and which an error, which a naïve turn to the politics of the signified and which, for example, a strategic attempt to put Saussure’s theory to work.70 The theoretical framework of the artworks and the concerns of the curators reflected a position based in cultural studies, made apparent by the selection of additional catalogue essayists, which were highly distinguished scholars from various fields, none of whom were art historians. Aligned with the exhibition’s investment in interdisciplinary thinking, this choice nevertheless left it vulnerable to criticism. In the context of the October panel Rosalind Krauss spoke in defence of disciplinary expertise, explaining that: “art critics and historians are now modeling their own writing on those earlier examples of people coming from other fields with little competence in visual analysis. We have this development in which there is an absolute incapacity to attend to the signifier.”71 Krauss was not wrong. None of the individual essayists were able to define any formal specificity, or offer a broader perspective as to the significance of the exhibition’s larger contribution. As opposed to the entirety of the exhibition, which has since been repeatedly revisited and addressed in critical and art historical literature and its contribution acknowledged, the collection of essays did not yield any memorable or influential writing, as evidenced by the fact that, despite the on-going interest in the exhibition’s topics, its catalogue essays have rarely been cited as independent scholarly work (outside of discussions of the Biennial) in defence of cultural studies, identity politics, or multiculturalism. This is in contrast to work done elsewhere by the same authors, who were otherwise very influential. In his detailed analysis of the curatorial essays, Charles A. Wright Jr. criticised the exhibition’s terms: Any unifying coherence among the texts is clouded by a lack of a sustained [critical] vocabulary for addressing the issues raised by the work and any thematic

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reconciliation is relegated to evacuated signifiers of diversity and community … The result is a patchwork of often repetitively overlapping texts, with the curators selecting their favorite artists from the prescribed assortment, thereby staking some claim to curatorial individuality and authority.72

With a title alerting the reader to his perspective, Wright’s “The Mythology of Difference: Vulgar Identity Politics at the Whitney Biennial” is regardless a worthy article. Although I disagree with Wright’s general position, his analysis anticipates curatorial studies, putting forth a sophisticated argument about how the curatorial and institutional agenda ultimately replicated the liberal position that has typified other Biennials before it. Yet, both Wright’s and October’s criticism lack a thorough analysis of artworks and their installation, where some of their generalising claims would have been refuted. Instead of making an abstract distinction between signifier and signified, exhibition artists engaged a broad analysis of the sign influenced by a range of poststructuralist theories of signification and their application.73 The critique of the Biennial was therefore also about the competence of both artists and curators to work with theory.74 In both of her preliminary interviews for Andrea Fraser’s piece, exhibition curator Thelma Golden repeatedly qualified the identity politics of Biennial artists as stemming from “deconstructive” approaches. Golden’s general use of the term reflected the dissemination of poststructuralism within broader cultural circuits, and with it the clarification of its definition for accessibility’s sake. Realities of the profession dictate that curators mediate between art as a specialised academic discipline and a general public. Golden later emphasised this paradox: “In my specialty I have to be a generalist.”75 It is here that I find fault with the ways in which the Biennial was measured by academic criteria, instead of being allowed a space for looser experimentation. Golden’s employment of the term “deconstruction” described very well the tendency of the artists to simultaneously critique as well as pay homage to the artistic practices with which they were in dialogue, a primary characteristic of the deconstructive mode. Lorna Simpson: the anecdotal referent

Lorna Simpson’s installation, Hypothetical? (1992), also begged a wider semiotic palette than a distinction between signifier and signified (Figures 4.7, 4.8). Activating some established artistic devices, in a white-cube space Simpson arranged a grid of manifold brass-instrument mouthpieces on one wall, faced, on the other, by a close-up photograph of a black man’s lips and chin, enlarged to a commercial scale. On the third wall, barely seen at first, a diminutive Plexiglass frame, printed with the question “hypothetical?”, contained a small newspaper clipping quoting Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s response to

Lorna Simpson, Hypothetical?, 1992. Detail. Mixed media: photograph, newspaper clipping, instrument mouth pieces, mouthpieces and audio dimensions variable. Courtesy of Lorna Simpson and Salon 94, New York.

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Lorna Simpson, Hypothetical?, 1992. Detail. Courtesy of Lorna Simpson and Salon 94, New York.

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the Rodney King verdict, which acquitted the police officers who had been caught on tape beating him up: “Asked whether he would now be afraid to be a black man in Los Angeles if he were not the Mayor, Mr. Bradley paused, then said: ‘No, I would not be scared. I would be angry.’ ” It was to this last element of the installation that Rosalind Krauss objected. She first identified the objects organised in a grid and the truncated photograph as two taxonomic fields. Reading their interplay she admired the economy of presentation, only to be disappointed by the use of a specific political referent. I was thinking about form—about why those mouthpieces were in a grid, why the body was deprived of its matrix, the lips excised. I was thinking about what I was being shown visually. Then, on the wall bridging between the two ‘grids,’ there was the newspaper clipping about Tom Bradley being asked whether, were he not mayor of Los Angeles, would he, as a black man, be afraid after the Rodney King verdict. And he said, “No, I wouldn’t be afraid; I’d be angry.” I thought that was irrelevant to the piece, and not particularly interesting.76

The grid—Rosalind Krauss wrote in her 1979 essay—derives meaning through internal surface relations, and thus declares the ultimate autonomy of painting, emancipating it from a referent in nature or the world.77 The question probed by Krauss in 1993 followed suit in asking why drive the point home by relying on an external referent, as form itself can speak politically. But form can only comment on the politics of form. It was the form of text, not just the meaning of form, that was at stake. Huey Copeland explained: “As did her teacher [Eleanor Antin], Simpson seized on conceptualism’s signature tropes—the grid, seriality, repetition, and above all, language—in order to examine how our knowledge of the world comes to be organized.”78 Taking a broader definition of form Simpson juxtaposed various means of representation and communication: images, objects, and text that yield visual relations, sound, or meaning, comparing their modes of transmission and parsing for the viewer that moment of reception, the space of interpretation. The visual display of the sound-producing objects emphasised their muteness, as did the extreme close-up that truncated the human body, fixing a person as an image and signifier. The question begged was: signifier of what, for whom and how? The space between the two walls animated the fact that the viewer could see either the photograph on one side, or the grid on the other. The work was therefore not only about the formal rearrangement of the found objects or the compositional photographic choices, but their animation in a space, where perception and interpretation are deliberately broken into stages, for the viewer to observe. It was here, one could argue, that the minute and translucent frame, barely visible in the middle of the sizeable third wall, did not merely function as a political referent, whether of blackness

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in general or the Los Angeles Riots. The trope activated by Simpson was that of the anecdote. What Krauss saw as excessive was precisely that, the “excessive” operation of the anecdote as Joel Fineman identified.79 A literary genre that “uniquely refers to the real,” the anecdote, according to Fineman had an ambiguous status as neither history nor fiction. It was as such a double mode of reference, pointing to both the referent and to itself as a function within the text. The anecdote was “embedded” by the New Historicists as a strategic device within the writing of history to mark historiographical consciousness, typical of late twentieth-century practices and visible in the attention to method that repeatedly appeared in many Biennial artworks, as evidenced by Simpson’s evocation of the grid. Thus, between the two walls, as Krauss would have preferred, the work’s politics would indeed function on the level of the signifier. However, by triangulating the grid and the photograph, Simpson pointed the viewers not only to the realm of the signified but also to the historical event as referent. Qualified and framed through Simpson’s presentation, the clip could have been seen to function like Fineman’s anecdote, as a (mediated) window into the real. As a synthetic proposition work, Hypothetical?—between the spatial, the visual, and language—revealed something about the screen of mediation. Overlaying the clip with the question “hypothetical?”, Simpson both challenged the tone of the question posed to the Mayor, and highlighted how a racialised lens predetermined the disposition of the question. The clip brought to light the relentless enactment of racial relations in every aspect of life, exposing how modes of identification inflect language, a fact that could manifest only in usage and circulation and not in the abstract study of language. The play of signification and the potential of the formal and material properties of the artwork to proliferate meaning were not negated, but rather built upon and directed to address the politics of race, gender, sex, and class as embodied and lived conditions. This understanding of the signified as inextricably bound to the signifier, and then as part of a constitutional matrix, was at the heart of the 1993 Biennial. Conclusion: multiculturalism as institutional reality

The tone with which October debated the Biennial reflects the methodological differences between a formalist attitude and approaches based in the perspectives of postcolonial and cultural studies that were concerned with the question of representation and cultural difference.80 October’s was a political mode of formalism, clearly distinct from the conservative outlooks that sought “beauty” or “aesthetics” and opposed any political preoccupation with art.81 For October media and form were inherently political, thus they agreed with the overall political position of the Biennial but disagreed with its curatorial methods

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and artistic choices. Leftist formalist perspective considered the politics of identity (as a protest program), multiculturalism (as arts and state policy), or cultural studies (as the according academic discipline) to be reformist in their nature. This and other October projects were critical of the ways in which identity politics formulated their opposition of hegemony and the terms by which it had effected change that took place within the confines of the liberal state apparatus. Indeed, “multiculturalism” was in effect a bureaucratic term that had masked, rather than structurally upset, the function of an institution historically steeped in racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and class discriminations.82 However, simply negating it wholesale remained an idealised and idealising critical exercise, offering no alternative while overlooking the complexity of its concrete history and necessary function for living subjects. Contextualising abolition from a broader perspective, Theo Goldberg cited three major periods in anti-racist mobilisation: abolitionism throughout the nineteenth century; anti-colonialism and the Civil Rights movements from roughly the 1920s through the 1960s; and the anti-apartheid and the multicultural movements of the 1970s to the 1990s. Positioning anticolonialism and the Civil Rights movement as global phenomena allowed a more comprehensive perspective on the multiculturalism movements as an attempt to accommodate the consequent diversification of metropolitan areas. Goldberg stated: Multiculturalism sought to secure and embody these ethnoracial shifts in social culture and institutions, to open up socio-cultural arrangements and institutional life to a more diverse set of habits and practices, thus wresting definitional power from narrow homogenous restriction, repression, and control. In the worse cases, though, multiculturalism has served as a form of appeasement for those increasingly left behind as well as convenient public relations and advertising modalities for corporate interests.83

David Harvey was one of the Leftist scholars who saw identity politics as compatible with neoliberalism, complicit with the project to restore power to the economic elite and re-establish conditions for the accumulation of power. He warned against the ease in which identity politics have assimilated into the structure of capitalism: “Neoliberal rhetoric, with its foundational emphasis upon individual freedoms, has the power to split off libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social justice through the conquest of state power.”84 Harvey gives the example of the city of New York, which he explains had become the template upon which Ronald Reagan built his neoliberal transformation nationally, and also globally through the International Monetary Fund. In New York a business-friendly climate gave rise to gentrification.

The political referent in debate

The city’s elite institutions were mobilized to sell the image of the city as a cultural centre and tourist destination (inventing the famous logo ‘I Love New York’). The ruling elites moved, often fractiously, to support the opening up of the cultural field to all manner of diverse cosmopolitan currents. The narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity became the leitmotif of bourgeois urban culture. Artistic freedom and artistic licence, promoted by the city’s powerful cultural institutions, led, in effect, to the neoliberalization of culture … The city’s elites acceded, though not without a struggle, to the demand of lifestyle diversification (including those attached to sexual preference and gender) and increasing consumer niche choices (in areas such as cultural production). New York became the epicentre of postmodern cultural and intellectual experimentation.85

This debate continued in the November 2009 issue of Artforum, which published Harvey’s review of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Commonwealth (2009) and the authors’ response side by side to highlight an exchange. Culminating the trilogy that commenced with Empire (2000) and continued with Multitude (2004), it was a comprehensive political theory of globalisation that advocated for the politics of identity as a viable strategy, precisely because identity aims for the abolition of its own terms and categories. It echoed a sentiment that had been understood by artists for quite some time, as Gregg Bordowitz underscored in a roundtable about identity: “Rather than reject identity altogether, I wanted to explode it. I wanted to produce confusion about who I was. I thought the aim of identity politics was to destroy established identities, not to assert them.”86 This investigation of identity, common to so many practitioners in the later part of the twentieth century, points to an even more foundational one, the relation of identity, self, individuality, or subjectivity, to community, communality, and citizenship, which brings up the question of rights, legal and philosophical, that in return brings us back to the distinction between an abstract notion of the rights of man and the problems posed to this universal concept when it comes into friction with reality. These dialogues in and around art of the 1990s posed identity politics as a problem of modern democratic citizenship. Étienne Balibar identified the crux of the problem of modern citizenship in the universalisation of rights post World War II, when privileges were substituted by a principle of access to rights and participation for all. But an inherent contradiction already marks the great declarations of rights upon which the constitutions of modern nation states were built and that assume the mutual imbrication of equality and liberty, or the concept of equaliberty that Balibar developed from the work of several philosophers. He identified three problems in putting this theoretical prospect into effect: the competition between the notion of fundamental rights and popular sovereignty; the duality

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of a communitarian versus a proprietary concept of “man”; and finally the ways in which the concept of the universal is based upon exclusion. Borrowing specifically from the philosopher Jürgen Habermas and the jurist ErnstWolfgang Böckenförde, Balibar points to inherent contradictions of democracy, for example, the right to insurrection. Equaliberty is, on the one hand, impossible to implement, even though it is an incontestable juridical ideal, on the other: Equaliberty requires realizations of the fundamental rights of individuals to political participation and decision-making, whose concrete manifestations include precisely the rights of freedom of conscience and expression, juridical guarantees, even “social rights” to education and professional status. In this sense equal liberty is the name of a double bind: it names what makes it impossible to choose between different expressions of the democratic idea, or the idea of emancipation, but also what makes it illegitimate to choose without dissolving the political link between the individual and the community. It denotes both a universality of principles posed (and declared) within the horizon of humanity, and an autonomy of decision that is instituted as “popular sovereignty.”87

Balibar ends with the question of how to reconcile the anthropology of subjectivity with that of agency, relying on Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (first published in 1951): the reversal of the historical and theoretical relationship between “man” and “citizen,” a perspective that dissolves the idea of foundation by explaining how man is made by citizenship and not citizenship by man, that intrinsically conjoins the problematic of equal liberty (or of the “universal right to politics” wherever one is “thrown” by history) with that of the inclusion of the excluded, or the exclusion of exclusion, seems to us in so many ways decisive and unavoidable.88

The legacy of the 1990s, which extended the principles of Civil Rights through the ground-work of identity politics, can be understood through this focus on the relation of identity to rights. The resurgence of political art that analysed the meaning of form, unpacked modes of signification, and applied them to living bodies as case studies, operated on the tensions between a generic or universal concept of the democratic citizen and the specificity inherent to the application of rights. It is therefore not an identity politics that aims for a seat at an existing table, but one intent on overturning the definition and function of the table. With access to rights, the subject constituted on a set of exclusions and marginalisation now aimed to gain access to full rights, while transposing the exclusionary constitution at the very heart of the concept of rights, participating in, while challenging the limits of, democracy’s cultural institutions. It was both a different philosophical notion of the universal than in Kosuth’s notion of the analytic

The political referent in debate

proposition and a different attitude to art’s practical application. Art can be abstract, but art itself is not an abstraction, as it necessarily manifests through some type of material reality. What the 1993 Biennial curators found in the art that they consolidated was how abstract ideas were applied to a living public. Notes 1 Craig Owens, “Representation, Appropriation, and Power,” Art in America 70, no. 5 (May 1982): 9. 2 Noah Horowitz, “Art Investment Funds,” in Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 143–187. 3 In a concise description David Harvey summarises neoliberalism through a case study of the U.S. invasion of Iraq: “What the US evidently sought to impose by main force on Iraq was a state apparatus whose fundamental mission was to facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation on the part of both domestic and foreign capital. I call this kind of state apparatus a neoliberal state. The freedoms it embodies reflect the interests of private property owners, businesses, multinational corporations, and financial capital.” Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7. For an expansive later view see Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London and New York: Verso, 2013). 4 Mary Kelly, “Feminist Art: Assessing the 1970s and Raising Issues for the 1980s,” in Imaging Desire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 15–19. 5 Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Also widely influential was Brian Wallis and Marcia Tucker, eds., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984). 6 Kate Linker and Jane Weinstock, eds., Difference: On Representation and Sexuality (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984). 7 Diversifying methodological dispositions to identity and political art in general was Tucker’s explicit agenda, for which she repeatedly advocated, as evidenced in many of her board and paper presentations throughout her career. Marcia Tucker Papers, 1957–2004, from the collection of the Getty Research Institute Special Collections. 8 Juli Carson, “On Discourse as Monument: Institutional Spaces and Feminist Problematics,” in Alternative Art New York: 1965–1985: A Cultural Politics Book for the Social Text Collective, ed. Julie Ault (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press in collaboration with the Drawing Center New York, 2002), 121–157. 9 Words in the artwork are crossed-out at an angle. 10 Hal Foster, “Subversive Signs,” in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985), 99–118. Foster offers an excellent account of the return to the visual after the conceptual. But what Foster neglects in his analysis is that the work of the 1980s did not spring out of nowhere, but was also part of a longer intellectual genealogy.

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11 A recent exhibition suggested this genealogy as central to contemporary art. See Anne Ellegood and Johanna Burton, eds., Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology (New York: Prestel, in association with Hammer Museum, 2014). 12 For the impact of the AIDS crisis on 1980s art see Helen Molesworth, ed., This Will Have Been: Art Love and Politics in the 1980s (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012). 13 Douglas Crimp, “Introduction,” October 43: AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (Winter 1987): 15. 14 For an analysis of alternative AIDS media in the context of AIDS representation see Alexandra Juhasz, AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). 15 William Olander, “On View,” New Museum Brochure (1987), http://archive.newmuseum.org/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/7910. 16 Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston, AIDS Demo Graphics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990). 17 Russell Ferguson et al., eds., Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 18 Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” October 53 (1990): 93–109. 19 Nilda Peraza et al., eds., The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990). The exhibition took place at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, New York. May 12–August 19, 1990. 20 Gary Sangster and Laura Trippi, “From Trivial Pursuit to the Art of the Deal: Art Making in the Eighties,” in The Decade Show, ed. Peraza et al., 68. 21 Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (1989) (London: Routledge, 1990). Such views are also reflected in Linda Martin Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 22 Fuss, “The “Risk” of Essence,” in Essentially Speaking, 12–13. 23 David Deitcher, “Taking Control: Art and Activism,” in The Decade Show, ed. Peraza et al., 180–197. 24 This echoing Rasheed Araeen’s scathing criticism of the demand placed on him to make ethnic art or none at all, in “From Primitivism to Ethnic Arts,” Third Text 1, no. 1 (1987): 6–25. 25 “The Decade Show: Identity Frameworks in the 1980s,” in the Marcia Tucker Papers, 1957–2004, Getty Research Institute Special Collections (from box 84, file 4: The Decade Show, notebooks 1 and 2). 26 William Olander, contribution to “MASS” Brochure (New York: New Museum, with Group Material, 1986), http://archive.newmuseum.org/index.php/Detail/Object/ Show/object_id/7912. 27 Alison Green, “Citizen Artists: Group Material,” Afterall 26 (Spring 2011): 1–8, www.afterall.org/journal/issue.26/citizen-artists-group-mat. 28 Parts of this chapter and the Renée Green analysis in Chapter 1 have been published in “The 1993 Whitney Biennial: Artwork, Framework, Reception,” Journal of Curatorial

The political referent in debate

Studies 2, no. 2 (June 2013): 142–168. I thank the editors Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher for their excellent editorial suggestions. 29 On its twentieth anniversary the 1993 Biennial was a major reference point for the exhibition and the catalogue of the New Museum’s 2013, NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star. Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Jenny Moore, and Margot Norton in the entire building of the New Museum around the idea of an exhibition as a “time-capsule,” NYC 1993 emphasised the centrality of the political climate to artists of that period, as well as the renewed relevance of “issues such as racial and gender politics, globalism, and institutional critique” for contemporary artistic practices. Multiple works from the 1993 Biennial were exhibited and the 2013 catalogue republished both Thelma Golden’s essay and the October roundtable (see note lxiii). The subtitle of the 2013 show references a 1994 Album by Sonic Youth. Citations are taken from the exhibition website: www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/nyc-1993-experimental-jet-set-trashand-no-star. 30 Judith Dobrzynski wrote: “The ’93 Biennial breaks with its recent predecessors, which drew criticism for being too attuned to star artists promoted by trend galleries.” Dobrzynski, “But Where to Hang It?” Business Week, June 13, 1993. Roberta Smith saw the show as an antithesis to previous Whitney Biennials that were heavily influenced by New York dealers and collectors, while Kay Larson also mentioned that: “Previous Biennials were criticized for rounding up the usual suspects from the commercial galleries.” Smith, “At the Whitney: A Biennial With a Social Conscience,” New York Times, March 5, 1993; Kay Larson, “What a Long Strange Trip,” New York Magazine, March 22, 1993, 71. 31 Jennie Klein, “Circumventing the Center: Identity Politics and Marginalization,” New Art Examiner 22 (December 1994): 12–13. 32 David Rimanelli, “All Talk No Action,” Artforum 31, no. 9 (May 1993): 9. 33 Roger Kimball, “Of Chocolate, Lard and Politics,” National Review, April 26, 1993, 55. 34 Elisabeth Sussman, “Then and Now: Whitney Biennial 1993,” Art Journal 64, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 77. 35 Sussman, “Then and Now,” 75. 36 Additional negative criticism appeared in 1993 by Arthur Danto, Robert Hughes, Michael Kimmelman, Peter Plagens, Richard Ryan, and John Taylor with mixed responses in the eleven Artforum International reviews. Hilton Als et al., “Whitney Biennial 1993: Eleven Article Special Section,” Artforum International 31, no. 9 (May 1993): 7–17. 37 Jim Drobnick, “Multicultural Blues: An Interview with Michele Wallace,” (1990) in Dark Designs and Visual Culture, ed. Michele Wallace (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2004), 239. 38 Challenges to the binary status of the concept of marginality came in multiple fields of the art and humanities in cross-continental exchanges, many of which appeared as special journal issues or anthologies. See for example Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, “Introduction: De Margin and De Centre,” Screen 29, no. 4 (Fall 1988): 2–11.

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39 Thelma Golden, “What’s White …?” in 1993 Biennial Exhibition (Whitney Biennial), ed. Elisabeth Sussman (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1993), 27. 40 Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in ICA Documents 7: Black Film/British Cinema, ed. Kobena Mercer (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1989) and Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” in Questions of Cultural Identity, eds. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), 1–17. 41 Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 27. 42 Golden, “What’s White …?” 35. 43 Frances M. Moran, Subject and Agency in Psychoanalysis: Which is to be Master? (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 4. 44 Moran, Subject and Agency in Psychoanalysis, 4, 62. 45 Fred Wilson had actually arrived at his practice by working in museums, where he observed human interactions and institutional ideologies, as well as by reading James Clifford’s critiques of display practices. See Darby English, “Fantasias of the Museum,” in How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 137–200. This demonstrates the various ways in which influences circulated throughout the disciplines. 46 Jennifer A. González, “Against the Grain: The Artist as Conceptual Materialist,” in Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations 1979–2000, eds. John Alan Farmer and Antonia Gardner (Baltimore: Center for Art and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County Press, 2001), 24. 47 Critical reconsiderations of the relation between subjectivity and identity were circulating at the time. For example, Eduardo Cadava et al., eds., Who Comes After the Subject? (New York: Routledge, 1991), or John Rajchman, ed., The Identity in Question (New York: Routledge, 1995). A retrospective view can be seen in Brian Wallis et al., eds., Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America (New York: New York University Press, 1999). 48 Amelia Jones, “Multiculturalism, Intersectionality and ‘Post-Identity’,” in Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (New York: Routledge, 2012), 131. 49 On the use of the concept of “the public” as political capital see Craig Owens, “The Yen for Art,” in Discussions in Contemporary Culture no.1, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Dia Art Foundation and Bay Press, 1987), 16–23. 50 On the corporatisation of museums see Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October 54 (Autumn 1990): 3–17. These concerns continued to be key in the later work of Biennial artist Andrea Fraser. See Fraser, “A Museum is Not a Business. It is Run in a Businesslike Fashion,” in Beyond the Box: Diverging Curatorial Practices, ed. Melanie Townsend (Banff: Banff Centre Press, 2003), 109–122. 51 I thank Andrea Fraser for generously sharing with me fourteen hours of interview footage. 52 Of course this portrait was speculative, as it only represented the part of the institution that mediated between its governing body and the public. 53 The tension between the artificiality of “pure” documentaries and the ability of “fake” documentaries to reveal how fact comes to be constructed is examined in

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Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner, eds., F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Fraser’s piece in many ways fits the category of “fake documentary.” 54 In parts of the interviews, the curators were also asked to describe and discuss the artworks, their selection, and installation, but little of this materials appeared in the outcome. 55 Als et al., “Whitney Biennial 1993,” 7. 56 Daniel J. Martinez, conversation with the author, April 23, 2011. 57 It is important to underscore that Martinez had been a student of Michael Asher at the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts), and that his attitude to artmaking has been deeply influenced by the critique of institutions. 58 Martinez underscored that the piece was first and foremost created in response to the establishment of the art-advisory department at Citibank, co-devised by Jeffrey Deitch. Daniel J. Martinez, “Visiting Artist Lecture Series” (California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, October 28, 2008). In the years leading up to the Biennial the effects of the market on art and its institutions were in constant debate as, for example, Peter Passell wrote: “The big losers in the art-as-investment boom are museums.” Peter Passell, “Vincent Van Gogh, Meet Adam Smith,” New York Times, February 4, 1990). 59 Daniel J. Martinez, “Visiting Artist Lecture Series” (Lecture at California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, October 28, 2008). 60 Daniel J. Martinez, conversation with the author, November 11, 2008. 61 Martinez, 2011. 62 Hal Foster et al., “The Politics of the Signifier: A Conversation,” October 66 (Fall 1993): 3. October editors were Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss, along with doctoral candidate Miwon Kwon and conceptual artist Silvia Kolbowski. 63 Foster et al., “The Politics of the Signifier,” 7. 64 Judith Butler, “Subjection, Resistance, Resignification” Between Freud and Foucault,” and Jacques Rancière, “Politics, Identification, Subjectivization,” in Rajchman, ed., The Identity in Question, 229–249 and 63–69; and Hall and Du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity. 65 Biennial critics should have considered Derrida’s observation that there exists an intrinsic presence of the autobiographical in every production, as well as his emphasis on meaning’s realisation in the realm of the other. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie V. McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988). 66 Renée Green et al., eds., Negotiations in the Contact Zone (Lisbon: Assirio and Alvim, 2003). 67 Renée Green, “Discussion,” in Negotiations in the Contact Zone, eds. Green et al., 350. 68 Rosalind Krauss, “Welcome to the Cultural Revolution,” October 77 (Summer 1996): 83–96. I consider this debate as an exchange concerning methodologies of practice in the spirit of the Frankfurt School. The opening shot was fired by the publication of Douglas Crimp’s resignation letter from the October editorial board in 1990,

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because his co-editors, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, refused to publish the entirety of the “How Do I Look” queer cinema conference, citing editorial discretion. While Krauss and Michelson questioned the “quality” of some conference papers, Crimp argued for a more open-ended approach within the budding field of queer studies, and left, citing the incident as endemic. Instead, October published some proceedings from the conference “The Humanities as Social Technology,” including a paper by Stuart Hall on the emergence of cultural studies. Bad ObjectChoices, eds., How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991). Crimp’s letter of resignation was published as “To Our Readers,” October 53: The Humanities as Social Technology (Summer 1990): 110–112. 69 Krauss, “Welcome to the Cultural Revolution”; Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” (1957) in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, 146–175 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977); and Philippe LacoueLabarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan (1973), trans. Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). 70 Krauss’s layered argument merits further consideration, specifically in relation to the question of theoretical expertise. Douglas Crimp responds to some of her claims where he considers the importance of cultural studies to understanding Andy Warhol’s extended oeuvre in the context of queerness. See Douglas Crimp, “Getting the Warhol We Deserve,” Social Text 59 (Summer 1999): 49–66. Both texts cite the formative self-critical “Banality in Cultural Studies,” Discourse 10, no. 2 (1988): 3–29, by cultural scholar Meaghan Morris. 71 Foster et al., “The Politics of the Signifier,” 22. 72 Charles A. Wright, Jr., “The Mythology of Difference: Vulgar Identity Politics at the Whitney Biennial,” (1993), reprinted in Art, Activism, and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage, ed. Grant H. Kester (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 84. 73 By the early 1990s Derrida’s critique of the Sausseurian sign, vis-à-vis Edmund Husserl’s thinking of the sign in relation to consciousness, was but one example of the theories circulating. See Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays: On Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 74 In the years following the Biennial, Krauss distinguished between strategic de-skilling as an artistic device in avant-garde practices, and the de-skilling of disciplines as a result of their collapsing into larger groupings under the interdisciplinary umbrella, driven in universities by administrative agendas. Krauss, “La Mort des Compétences,” in Oùva l’histoire de l’art contemporain?, ed. Laurence Bertrand-Dorléac (Paris: L’image- École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, 1997), 241–247. 75 Dorothy Spears, “Curators Wanted: Must Love Art and Travel,” New York Times, November 26, 2006. 76 Foster et. al., “The Politics of the Signifier,” 6. 77 Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (Summer 1979): 50–64. 78 Huey Copeland, “Lorna Simpson’s Figurative Transitions,” in Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 73.

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79 Joel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction,” in The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare’s Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 59–90. 80 Of course there were distinctions and nuances between the various scholars on both sides, as well as exceptions. One such exception on October’s side was Benjamin Buchloh, who attended several of the Biennial’s early planning meetings, and in the panel was defending it, albeit through the lens of social realism. 81 For example, Hilton Kramer and the magazine The New Criterion. 82 Following Wahneema Lubiano, José Esteban Muñoz distinguishes between pluralist (weak) and radical (strong) multiculturalism, in “Performing Disidentity: Disidentification as a Practice of Freedom,” in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 167. 83 Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), 16. 84 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 41. 85 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 47. 86 Rhea Anastas et al., “The Artist Is a Currency,” Grey Room 24,(Summer 2006): 114. 87 Étienne Balibar, “Is a Philosophy of Human Civic Rights Possible? New Reflections on Equaliberty,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004): 319. 88 Balibar, “Is a Philosophy of Human Civic Rights Possible?,” 321.

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Institutional gender: from Hans Haacke’s Systems Theory to Andrea Fraser’s feminist economies

The essence of Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism is the rendering of the social nature of capitalist production as invisible to the producers. Without this illusion, the division of society into two parts, state and market, public and private, would not be possible. (Ann E. Davis)1

A visitor to the 1984–85 exhibition “Difference: On Representation and Sexuality” at the New Museum in New York may have wondered what a conceptualist work concerned with the critique of the market by the artist Hans Haacke was doing at a show about the social construction of gender and its implications for the subject.2 Haacke developed his practice from engagement with what he called “real-time systems,” into what has come to be canonised as “institutional critique,” but he was not explicitly concerned with feminism or the question of gender. At face value the answer is simple: the work focused on the representation of women, as its subject matter was a sketch of three nude women by the post-impressionist artist Georges-Pierre Seurat. Haacke’s work titled Seurat’s Les Poseuses (Small Version) (1888–1975) chronicled the painting’s provenance, including a detailed description of each owner, their political affinities, and the type of transaction by which the work had changed hands. Through this documentation, the status of the painting as an asset was highlighted over its cultural value. For the curators to place Haacke’s institutional critique into an exhibition concerned with the influences of post-structuralism and psychoanalytic discourses on art was to interpret gender as a type of “institution.” It revealed a set of shared concerns between artists preoccupied with gender analysis and those with conceptualism, as well as the significance of their interaction. As Silvia Kolbowski recalled: When the Difference show was at the New Museum in 1984/1985, I remember that there was a critique voiced about the work in the show not being sensitive to the institutional framework. I think it was either Mary Kelly or Victor Burgin’s response at the time to say that institutions were not just galleries or museums, they were also cultural discourses like sexuality and politics.3

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Importantly, the idea of sex as an institution was introduced by Ti-Grace Atkinson in the pamphlet “The Institution of Sexual Intercourse” (1968), published by The Feminists (1968–73), a radical feminist group that aimed to eliminate gender roles.4 This chapter looks at a development within institutional critique as bracketed by the work of Haacke and Andrea Fraser, highlighting their interest in art as a site of social interaction, and focusing on the connection made by Fraser between the personal and the financial transaction. This trajectory nests within two typologies of criticism leveled against institutional critique, addressed here and in Chapter 3: one claiming that all criticism is eventually subsumed into the system, and the other arguing that the gesture of exposing contradictions relies on a vulgar notion of political reality. This second position defined aesthetics as the form that makes intelligible what is illegible on the stage of politics, calling for the analysis of forms of visibility that define the appearance of politics. It is in some ways a formalist argument. In contrast, Fraser’s proposition brought a feminist perspective to institutional critique to show how politics appear in and through the human body. In her synthesis of an identity-based/feminist entry point to the work of institutional critique, Fraser offered a perspective on the making of a political stage and its subjects. Her work mapped how gender, the (working) human body, or the artwork appear, exist, or mediate transactions, and how value takes form in the process. Haacke’s timeline of Les Poseuses changing hands ended with the work’s purchase by one of the first art investment funds. As Brian Wallis wrote: “what first attracted Haacke to the Seurat painting was its splashy appearance in the annual report of Artemis, S.A. a Luxembourg-based firm founded in 1970. In the early 1970s, the concept of trading in fine art as a commodity, like any other, was still relatively rare.”5 This transaction is symbolic of the tectonic shift that would allow for a dramatic growth of the art market, namely the monetisation and financialisation of art. Until the 1980s the world of art trading was elitist and closed. Since then, the systematic investment in art for pure trading concerns, as opposed to passion or prestige collecting, has been developed to a historically unprecedented scale and diversity of activity.6 Art prices, behaving differently from stocks and bonds, have, under specific circumstances, proven to be resilient to economic depression, but inefficiencies, information asymmetries, and low liquidity still make it a risky investment.7 Systematic attempts to harness the potential of art to yield high financial returns began with the 1970s’ establishment of art-investment funds. The majority of art funds failed for a host of reasons such as high maintenance and transaction costs, the timing of sales, or conflicts of interest, to name key reasons. Auction houses and banks then developed multiple types of art-credit systems in the 1980s, which

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have since seen varying degrees of success. Although still highly speculative, art investment today has become a standard component in lucrative investment portfolios, as some investors believe that it algorithmically offsets a portfolio’s overall performance. The variety of services is unprecedented, as is the girth of the market. While before the 1980s to liquidise an art object meant to sell it, art has since been monetised by these various financial tools, as they deliver a greater measure of liquidity to the art object.8 That art could function as collateral for cash has turned it into not only a prestigious but also an advantageous investment, one of the biggest factors in the growth of the art market. This expansion, which we are in the throes of today, is part of the boom in speculative investment and the tendency to seek new avenues of capital gain.9 The work of Haacke and Fraser was developed in a context where the growth of the art market is a reflection of the turn to finance capital. At stake, as Noah Horowitz briefly noted, is the question of: “whether the rise of these speculative practices might, ironically, threaten the prestige values that make art so coveted in the first instance.”10 Art institutions, especially nonprofit art institutions, which the vast majority of American art museums are, play a significant role in establishing the significance and hence the prestige of particular practices and artists, which matters a great deal when it comes to contemporary art. The mixing of the market and nonprofit structures has increased greatly. The changing of conditions underscores the on-going relevance of institutional critique, a point driving the second half of this chapter. Institutional critique developed from the methods of conceptualism and is generally considered to be one of its major threads.11 The combination of terms first appeared when Hal Foster used Victor Burgin’s term “situational aesthetics” to define practices focused not on the art object itself, but its context: “The situational aesthetics of this art—its special attention to site, address and audience—is prepared by the varied institutional critique of such artists as Daniel Buren, Michael Asher, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers, Lawrence Weiner, John Baldessari and Joseph Kosuth.”12 Recognising that the meaning of art is not intrinsic, but rather derived from how it is positioned and framed, artists questioned the ideology and operation of institutions such as galleries, museums, publications, and private collections, focusing on social relations, or the frameworks of classification and circulation that endow art with meaning or value. They challenged the processes and procedures by which an art object comes into being, as well as the mythologies that established its cultural status.13 A subsequent generation of artists turned to additional apparatuses, which located and defined art and its authorship, focusing on such mechanisms as the conventions of labeling, and arrangement, or what defines the status of objects as “high art,” a distinct attitude to artistic practice isolated and defined by Andrea Fraser in 1985.14

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In her approach to art Fraser synthesised an array of feminist practices considered strategically contradictory, with a broader approach to the critique of institutions: My attraction to institutional critique had everything to do with what Griselda Pollock has described as the gendered myths, values, assumptions, silences, and prejudices that underlay the institutional inscription of artistic subjects and works. I understood institutional critique as a feminist practice, not only in terms of the politics of inclusion and exclusion, but in terms of the hierarchical systems of classification that mandate exclusion, and of the monopolies on definitions of legitimate culture and cultural legitimacy that empower exclusion.15

Fraser used critique as a form of engagement from within, citing Haacke’s practice as a precedent for a type of criticism applied to: “defend the institution of art from instrumentalization by political and economic interests.”16 What is then the correlation between institutional critique and the feminist critique of representation, and how does it relate to the state of museums today? One of the major debates around the success and failures of institutional critique as a mode of practice revolved around the efficacy of its subversive tactics.17 Instead of the commonly accepted dichotomy of complicity versus subversion, or the question of inside and outside the system, this chapter asks what roles and forms institutional critique can take today. Hans Haacke: the museum’s class conflict

Haacke’s practice has contributed to the dialog about what kind of activity can be named art. His work addressed the power structure of the museum by activating its public against its patrons and magnifying class contradictions. Haacke showed how and where the institution reflected its position as an agent of the liberal nation-state system. His projects transitioned from working with physical and biological systems to examining the relation between social systems and art as a system. He used a loose sociological approach not only to locate art on the map of class politics, but also to redefine what art practice, object, and reception could potentially be and mean. Following his early poll pieces, such as Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part I (1969) at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York, or Visitors’ Profile (1970) for the exhibition “Software” at the Jewish Museum (1970), Haacke devised MoMA-Poll (1970) for the duration of the “Information” (1970) exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (Figure 5.1). With the purchase of a museum ticket, visitors were given ballots, color-coded according to visitor categories that included regular ticketed visitors, membership cards, or complimentary tickets, the latter receiving ballots from the guards.18 The ballots were to be placed into one of two translucent “yes” or “no” boxes and counted photo-electronically

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5.1 

Hans Haacke, MOMA-Poll, 1970. 2 transparent ballot boxes with automatic counters, color-coded ballots, boxes each: 40 × 20 × 10 in. (101.6 × 50.8 × 25.4 cm), paper ballot 3 × 2½ in (7.6 × 64 cm) © Hans Haacke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

with the results posted daily.19 Museum personnel were activated in regulating the process, and the ballots themselves were consecutively numbered, adding a sense that the experiment was controlled. Installed above the boxes was a plaque that read: “Question: Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in November?” The question was designed by Haacke to position the museum in the perspective of the power apparatus, since the ties of the Rockefeller family to the MoMA de facto related it to state and financial dominance (as well as to the interdependence of the two). Abby Rockefeller was one of the three women founders of the museum; running at the time for New York governor re-election, Nelson Rockefeller was a trustee from 1932 and held terms as chairman of the board and as its president intermittently; his brother David,

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chairman of the powerful Chase Manhattan Bank, was trustee of the MoMA from 1948 and had been serving as MoMA board chairman since 1962. Haacke was not the first artist to bring to light the Rockefeller family’s involvement with both the MoMA or with war profiteering. In November 1969, the Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG), a splinter group from the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), co-founded by Jon Hendricks and Jean Toche, staged with Poppy Johnson and Silviana Goldsmith a guerrilla performance in the entrance lobby of the museum. Hendricks read a statement demanding the resignation of all Rockefellers from the board of trustees, accusing them of using the MoMA to cover up profits made from companies involved in manufacturing weapons used in the Vietnam War. The performers then scattered documentation materials from their research into the background of the Rockefellers, and a flyer that provided citations and summaries of Rockefeller family involvement in the research and manufacture of standard and chemical weapons, also highlighting conflict-of-interest-ridden financial and political connections between various Rockefeller interest groups, the military, and civic leadership. They finally broke into a theatricalised fight, ripping each other’s clothes, screaming, and spilling the cow blood they had hidden inside their clothes, earning a round of applause before winding down and collapsing to the floor. They managed to leave in a hurry before the arrival of the police.20 A MoMA program described Blood Bath as one of several “unsolicited and sometimes subversive artist actions,” all of which were contextualised by an official museum brochure as the dawn of the current performance program, demonstrating the ease with which liberal institutions can contain and subsume radical work under their logic.21 The proliferation at the time of artist groups and actions targeting museums testifies to the strong sentiment against the control of museums by private interests, and the direct ties the museum had to a power apparatus that clearly places it in ethical conflict with democratic principles.22 Haacke’s “democratizing” strategies, as Rosalyn Deutsche identified them, urged viewers to question the alleged political neutrality of the museum space: Beginning with the polls, as we have seen, Haacke cast doubt on the universalizing discourse that circulates in spaces of aesthetic display, challenging it not with an equally de-politicizing pluralism but by withdrawing support from lies through attention to the particular.23

As Deutsche showed, Haacke’s work framed how the ideology of the elite contradicted what the mission statement for a museum such as the MoMA was declaring. Thus about David Rockefeller: David’s position is especially significant in light of Haacke’s democratic ambitions. For it was he and a group of other “private citizens” who, three years after

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MOMA- Poll, would bring together prominent government, business, academic, and professional figures to form the Trilateral Commission, an organization whose mandate was to foster a new world order controlled by the liberal democracies of North America, western Europe, and Japan. Among the reports issued by various task forces of the commission was one on the “governability of democracy,” which concluded that increasing demands for political participation in the 1960s had weakened governmental authority and, indeed, all authority based on hierarchy, wealth, and expertise. What the report described as an “excess of democracy” produced a crisis of democracy that must be resolved by a return to passivity on the part of the people.24

Indeed, these “increasing demands for political participation in the 1960s,” were affecting museums on more than one level. Evidently, as Deutsch showed, these protests were perceived as a real threat and as promoting an “excess of democracy,” which was the kind of democracy sought by art protestors who aimed to diversify and democratise the control of culture in our society. In the case of the Rockefellers, we can most certainly see how Haacke’s work spoke directly to the museum board chairman, as well as put on display a communiqué about the chairman’s economically and politically interested investments.25 Haacke’s work aimed to reveal such connections, not as a reference to a “truth”—a reality the viewer could access through the reference to politics in his work—but as a way to show how dynamics that take place on the level of representation reflect the ties of wealth and government that are material. Vered Maimon criticised Haacke’s positivism, arguing that later works by Pierre Huyghe and Walid Raad have dealt more successfully with the contemporary conditions of virtuality. Referencing Jacques Rancière, Maimon argued that revealing the discrepancies between what the institution claims to be and what it actually is, the hypocrisies it aims to cover up, is futile, if we ignore the fact that politics, like reality itself, are themselves forms of fictions that emerge from the aesthetics that organise how it is that we come to know reality as such.26 However, I would argue, Haacke’s work did not simply attempt to expose corruption with the belief that it could consequently be remedied. Maimon compares Haacke’s with subsequent practices on terms not available at the time when his most significant works were made. That Haacke and other artists known under the banner of institutional critique had a pragmatic understanding of political art and that their work aimed to reveal the first level of ideological masking laid the groundwork for later discourses that challenged given notions of history or politics as “real” or “true.” Haacke (and the Conceptual artists that worked before or around him) used systematic analysis as a way to identify the structural relations in the interaction between culture and politics, where culture connects to political conditions such as war profiteering, and they located their intervention at that point to

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involve the audience in that dialog. The significance of the work was not just in peeling away the masking layer and exposing a truth about reality, but rather in the gesture that would demonstrate where and how a mediated sense of reality has concrete consequences. Evidenced in his early concern with systems and mediation, Haacke’s polls turned attention on how one system connects to another, government and power to art and the museum, and vice versa. But how to slip in a political referent between, schematically, a triangle of conservative museum governance, liberal administration, and the radical ambitions of political art? In the proposal Haacke sent to Kynaston McShine, he wrote: “Two transparent ballot boxes are positioned in the exhibition, one for each answer to an either-or question referring to a current socio-political issue.”27 The issue itself was not specified at the proposal stage. Perhaps because the actual question was only installed at the last minute Haacke avoided provoking censorship, a subject that was indeed broached shortly thereafter. MoMA director John Hightower’s recollections of “Information” are worth quoting at length: That was also right at the beginning. Man, oh man, what a monster. Defending to my death [laughing] the right to artistic expression. There were a couple of elements of that that were really just horribly difficult. One was, of course, that David Rockefeller felt that it was—he seriously objected to the exhibition, unfortunately after it was already up and exhibited, and wanted an explanation as to why and how the Museum was involved in that sort of thing, which I wrote. It didn’t satisfy him one bit [laughing]. And to compound it, there was this piece by—gosh, it’s a Freudian block of his name, the artist who—it was a ballot box [Hans Haacke]. The question on the ballot box was, “Does Nelson Rockefeller’s refusing to denounce the war in Vietnam affect your willingness to vote for him in the coming election?”, or something like that. His office called up and said, “John, this thing is driving us nuts. You’ve got to get that out of there. You’ve got to kill that element of the exhibition.” And I said, “Not on your life. If I do that, it will have infinitely more attention than it’s receiving now. If you think it’s bad now, if I pull that thing, having put the exhibition up and on public view already, it’ll just be a nightmare.” And luckily, the Press Secretary to the Governor said, “You probably have a point”, and they didn’t force me to take it down. The artist was the same guy who created such a flap at the Guggenheim [Hans Haacke]. He was trying to provoke a censorship issue. Most of what he did, his fine arts pieces rather than his political arts pieces, were quite glacial and very, very beautiful, having to do with almost visually looking as if they were ice forms. Anyway, it was a very difficult exhibition to administrate my way through.28

This distinction, “fine arts pieces rather than his political arts pieces”, was an element in scholars Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach’s later analysis of how

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terms such as quality and aesthetic served to mask institutional ideology: “More than any other museum, MOMA developed the ritual forms that translated the ideology of late capitalism into immediate and vivid artistic terms—a monument to individualism, understood as subjective freedom.”29 But the entity called the “MoMA” was a complex agent whose so-called “will” was an outcome of a number of forces. Artworks like MoMA-Poll were aimed at displaying such sets of dynamics. But this was just the beginning. Francis Frascina showed how, since spheres were considered to be separate, journal editors, critics, curators, and museum directors were able to reconcile modernist criteria for art evaluation that were essentially enlightenment-based hierarchical theories of taste with Leftist class and abolitionist politics. They established and sustained a discourse of what did or did not qualify to be art, as part of their criteria system. The argument made against Haacke’s practice in the various cases of its censorship, was precisely that it was “not art.”30 Frascina contextualises the exchange of letters between Hightower and Rockefeller: Rockefeller agreed that the material should not have been removed from the show nor Haacke’s question changed, for artists “have every right to express their political view-points in their works” which should be displayed if “the art is up to MoMA standards … The Museum should continue to be in the vanguard of what is happening in art.” But Rockefeller states that he cannot see “how many of these works can be considered art. I simply do not understand how a poll, a collection of newspaper articles placed side by side, a blown-up page from a magazine, or a quotation from Andy Warhol have any artistic content whatsoever.”31

While in the case of the MoMA the right to define art remained with the artist, a year later Haacke’s proposal to exhibit Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, was famously censored by the Guggenheim director on the account that it was not art.32 When the New Museum exhibited it about fifteen years later, it was only because Marcia Tucker, an artist-oriented director and champion of political art, was able to convince the board of the work’s historical significance.33 Haacke had identified the museum’s potential as a place where a message to the ruling class could be transmitted in public view. He offered another means by which direct or indirect conversations could be initiated between the public, artists, administrators, and civic patrons. In this way, a poll was not mere art about politics, but art activating the viewer at the point where politics meet the evaluation of art. This dialog was part and parcel of the activities at AWC; as Julia Bryan-Wilson argued, the influence of AWC on Haacke was key to his focus on institutional framing, and his confrontational style: “Looking at his work next to the art workers’ demonstrations and

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protest graphics, I propose that Haacke’s appropriation of information was in explicit conversation with the activist practices of AWC.”34 Haacke’s work formed a direct link between participatory activism and what it means to practice art. If it can be said the agency of the artist is limited politically, i.e. that realistically art cannot change the world, Haacke proved art could change the social agreement about its own criteria and valuation. He wove his piece into the apparatus, so that the final work highlighted how a museum’s hidden hierarchies and complicity with a politics of oppression translate into criteria of value. Yet, “Information” was not absolved from the charge of complicity, as Les Levine realised: “Information” came at a time when the Art Workers’ Coalition had its many fights with the Museum of Modern Art. You can’t take energy away from a powerful system without giving that system a considerable amount of energy. The Art Workers’ Coalition was constantly attacking the Museum of Modern Art. The Museum of Modern Art then puts on this giant “Information” show, which includes all of its enemies. It becomes more powerful than it ever was before.35

But for withdrawal to be an act of resistance, it had to be a withdrawal from something. Artists negotiated their criticism of the institution and the necessity to remain within its context for visibility. Eve Meltzer located this ambivalence towards institutions in the political climate of the time: If there was a crisis of world proportions, then this exhibition made clear that it had to do not simply with the US invasion of Cambodia or the killing of the Kent State student protesters by the National Guard. Rather, artists contended with the idea that they and their work might be complicit. “Information” was, therefore, also about art and action, and art as activism. The very notion was embraced by artists and activists in search of new signifying means and revolutionary avenues of information.36

The forms of progressive art and the military industry shared the new systems aesthetics, feedback theories, and software mechanisms.37 Indeed, Haacke’s transition from working with physical and biological systems to social systems between the late 1960s and the early 1970s was in order to dissociate his work from a relation to the military industrial complex.38 Sociologists Howard Becker and John Walton showed that Haacke’s visitor polling both resembled and deviated from strict social science methods, and how he was able to provide a solid theory on the demographic of the museum visitor.39 As they explain, this young, educated, and upper-middle class audience was also well aware that the patron class harbored a conservative outlook on the role of art and that trustees aimed to control the museums

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where they served, inadvertently shaping conditions and outcomes of artistic production: Taken together, all of Haacke’s materials seem to imply a theory that describes the contemporary art world as one organized around an endemic conflict between the interests of those who produce the art and the broader public which supports them ideologically, on the one hand, and the interests of the much smaller group of wealthy people and politicians who provide the big money supporting the system.40

For Becker and Walton, the difference between the 1950s and 1960s social science, which brought the term “power structure” into common use but was simply ignored by those in power, Haacke’s work was located where those in power and subjects traversed a common space. As such his work did not render politics but set a stage for their enactment. Putting audience interaction on exhibit Haacke placed the meaning of the work in the realm of reception, a way of extending the Duchampian readymade strategy in the sense later identified by Krauss to be outside of the work, when she wrote: “The metaphor of the Fountain does not seem to have been wrought or fabricated by Duchamp but rather by the observer.”41 Politics was not merely the referent in Haacke’s work because the nature of his work transformed the relation of work/addressee altogether. Fredric Jameson observed how Haacke’s artistic methods were aligned with the social restructuring that was taking place in the 1960s: When we remember that, alongside a leftist critical and theoretical attention to such ideological institutions, there has also emerged a whole new gamut of “micro-politics”—as opposed to an older class party politics—it seems plausible enough to assume, not that such institutions suddenly appeared for the first time, but that, in the age of multinational corporations, they have become more socially visible and have also been endowed with semi-autonomous powers rather different from those which their earlier equivalents exercised. Thus, if bourgeois civil society, emerging from an earlier feudal order, in the process opened a space for the development of the classical forms of social class, perhaps it can now be asserted that in our time that same civil society has itself undergone dialectically new changes—in particular, a prodigious social fragmentation and atomization, in which a variety of new nonclass political forces appear, but within which relatively new forms of bureaucratic reorganization of power also appear (of which the great corporations are only the most dramatic manifestations), therefore demanding that new type of investigation which we have termed “institutional.”42

Although Haacke himself was not concerned with feminism or the politics of identity, his work with the synthetic proposition directly related to the recent

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“atomization” of social resistance struggles described by Jameson and which characterises identity politics. Haacke shared with identity-based practices an approach to politics as subject matter that came hand in hand with the analysis of art as a system of signification, and that reconfigured method, form, and gesture to reference subject matter as content. Andrea Fraser: from the public institution to the private transaction

In the last thirty years, Andrea Fraser has transitioned from wielding criticism against the institution to its defence. Fraser’s development in institutional critique is well documented, with her own writing providing context and theoretical analysis for the burgeoning field of curatorial studies.43 Like Haacke, her work addressed institutions, not as monolithic entities representing the power structure, but rather as layered spaces where nuanced power dynamics influence sets of typological relations. The collaboration with the museum was not taken as a contradiction of critique, but rather as a way to continuously inhabit a site that rightfully belongs to the public.44 As Fraser explained: “what better way to defend a practice of critique?! … The private non for profits have the responsibility to self-reflect.”45 Yet, Fraser did not merely turn the obligation to scrutinise on others, but also aimed it inwards, towards her position as an artist and a subject within the network of relations that formulates the broader field of art. In this respect, Fraser has put her art, herself, and her body on the line, underscoring that neither art nor subjects are autonomous entities. Her work reflects a synthesis of cultural feminism where women used their bodies in their work, with an analytic feminism that challenged language and representation, and a diagnostic critique that stemmed from conceptualist and infrastructural analysis. In a carefully tailored approach, she highlighted how subjects inhabit various functions within the field, asking what drives personal and professional agendas, how identifications are formed within institutions, and how those identifications support or resist the status quo. Arriving in New York in the mid-1980s, Fraser identified two major discourses that were mostly moving on separate tracks, but which she wished to synthesise.46 The first was centered on a postmodern critique and included the work of historians such as Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh, Craig Owens, and Douglas Crimp, who wrote about artists we now associate directly with institutional critique (also including Allan Sekula and Martha Rosler); and the second concerned performance-based feminism and/or a feminism related to film studies, with artists ranging from Yvonne Rainer to Adrian Piper or Mary Kelly. Seeing her project as bringing the two together, she developed a practice that considered the possibility of art as a service provision in an attempt to collapse the distinction between the site of art’s production and that of its consumption.47 She later recalibrated her approach when she realised

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that this type of work had become standardised and that one constituency in the institution would invite her to critique another. Her shift from working with critique as a service-provision model to the production of video work as objects can be seen to address the growing influence of the art market on nonprofit institutions. Save for a few national museums, the vast majority of art institutions in the Unites States are private/public nonprofit partnerships. To obtain and sustain this status they are beholden to guidelines mandating that they serve a/the public interest. I use the term “public” in this context, to underscore that nonprofit institutions are obligated to public service. Also, I use the term “nonprofit” when speaking in general about this structure, “institution” when referring to frameworks that regulate subjects, and “museum” to designate those specifically housing art. Interested private individuals have had influence on these institutions, a condition that has been exponentially exacerbated by the monetisation of art, a process that has been taking place over the course of Fraser’s career to date.48 It is in relation to this shifting context that I examine the development of her institutional critique practice. Coming of age during the moment of appropriation art and the critique of representation, Fraser wrote a key text about the work of Louise Lawler, where she recognised social positions, not just images, could be appropriated.49 Fraser built a character around the museum docent as a typology of position or function, but also around the demographic which, given the kind of volunteer service that it is, tends to be populated by retired, middle-class women. Her character animates the different aims and desires that drive the character’s engagement with art. Fraser first performed Jane Castleton for the exhibition Damaged Goods: Desire and the Economy of the Object (curated by Brian Wallis, the New Museum, 1986). Castleton was also the character making visible the multiple permutations of class contradiction in and around the institutions of art in Fraser’s Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989). Nine months of research into the history of the Philadelphia Museum of Art resulted in a script culled entirely from quotations. Descriptions of art from the general catalogue were intercut with civic documents, and reform and philanthropist theory, especially descriptions of the poor. Like many of Fraser’s works Museum Highlights exists in various forms from a script to be performed, published, taped, re-exhibited, or re-performed, to a series of connected events and objects of varying status that form the unity of “the work.” The extensive notes accompanying the published script reference the materials from which the final text was harvested, and rigorously explain Fraser’s logic and thinking about the work and the museum as sites of analysis.50 The progression of the performance traces the internalisation of social norms by the subject in relation to the types of legitimacies encouraged by the museum, as a type of institution that imposed self-regulation. In

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her erratic behavior Castleton reveals information and attitudes habitually suppressed by the institution. It also includes the framework and stage directions for Castleton. Often conflicting, the agendas Castleton animates in Museum Highlights gradually drive the character to the brink of psychological incoherence. Like other early works, where Fraser strung together found texts into scripts, the drama in Museum Highlights was amplified by her use of montage. In montage, the meaning of an element, in Fraser’s case the found text, can be influenced more by its placement in a sequence than by its original content. Montage was key in Fraser’s performance May I Help You? (1991), where found excerpts and citations about art by individuals from a range of class positions and professions were spliced to construct the script.51 The clash of culture and perspective between the various positions placed the audience in a critical vantage point from which to view how social and political positions come to be acquired.52 The montage technique highlighted the extremity of the characters’ statements. Strung together they echoed Pierre Bourdieu’s findings in several works, demonstrating his conclusion that cultural institutions serve to reinforce classed social divisions, rather than fulfilling their democratic promise as sites of transformation.53 Fraser’s jarring juxtapositions teased out the ways in which taste, itself formed by social parameters and conventions, is a type of institution. Commencing with deeply sincere remarks and ending in bitter irony, with many of the quotes taken directly from Bourdieu, the statements reproduced a range of positions, from laymen audiences to famous dealers such as Ileana Sonnabend and Barbara Gladstone, or intellectuals like James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, and Raymond Williams. Fraser’s acting shifted on cue, helping the audience to distinguish between the characters. The roles, which she referred to as “voices,” gradually became much larger than themselves as the performance progressed, underscoring a range of attitudes from humility to anger, absurdity, pretentiousness, or pomposity in the tone of her protagonists. The contradictory context and role of art, from elite pastime to a potential tool of democratic engagement, were foregrounded. Provocative and intense, the performance thrust the audience in and out of identification or dis-identification with the characters or the actor alternately. As Shannon Jackson had identified about the construction of the Jane Castleton character: “As a form of acting that ‘shows’ more than it ‘becomes’ its character, that showing simultaneously partakes in the ‘historicized’ mode that Brecht sought in his actors.”54 Coming in and out of alignment with the voices performed, Fraser’s virtuoso, rapid-fire position switching, jarred the audience out of complicit spectatorship at every turn. Many of the fragments referenced criteria, valuation, and the question of monetary versus cultural value and their relation to desire. For example, a section ventriloquising blue-chip art dealers dramatically stated:

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Look! It’s the illusion, first of all, that it hasn’t been made, that the plaster and paint were never produced and mixed and cast and applied, coat after coat, by a studio of labor. It’s the illusion that none of this was paid for and nothing will be bought, and it hangs there as if it just spread itself out before us voluntarily, of it’s [sic] own volition. It has always been there and will always be there— for us. The only work you do is wanting: I want it and I have it. It’s as simple as that. And then you produce its value—an inward value, an emotional value—when you’ve wanted it, you’ve looked for it and, at last, you’ve found it. And you would do anything to have it. You want it more than your mother’s love—more than money.55

When performed, the clash of contexts Fraser set up in the script reconfigured reality into parody. As the performance progressed the audience was shown typological class positions in their relationship to art, culminating with the remarks by an unemployed Boston man: This is the kind of thing that only means something to a particular type of person. Don’t think that I don’t understand it. I understand it. I understand that it was produced to mystify me, that it was produced to exclude me.56

It is betwixt and between these extreme positions that the artist situated herself and potentially her audience. Identifications, it is important to underscore, were set up as positions to occupy—a set of social relations, not descriptors of subjectivity. Ideally, jolting the viewer from one impossible identification to another was to reveal the discrepancy between how viewers see their position in relation to art, and their actual class alignment—pushing them to question the system that has led them to identify with the very structure responsible for their oppression. In one of the quotes McCollum stated: You know, if you’re not one of those people who affects history—and most of us are not—then how are you supposed to enjoy looking for personal meaning in the souvenirs of that class of people who manipulate history to your exclusion? I think it takes a pretty blind state of euphoric identification to enjoy another’s power to exclude you.57

The growth of the art market and the new museum boom led to an amplification of corporate and private interest control over those public institutions that by definition are mandated to hold artworks in the public trust; to care, research, and develop our communal cultural heritage.58 Nevertheless, claims by artists to resistance or subversions continued to feature in statements of intention, as well as responses and reception by curators, and critics, as Fraser wrote:

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The glaring, persistent and seemingly ever-growing misalignment between those legitimizing discourses—above all in their critical claims—and the social conditions of art have appeared to me as profoundly and often painfully contradictory, even fraudulent. My sense of this “misalignment” reached a crisis point a few years ago. It wasn’t just the emergence of art as an asset class, or the merging of artistic with spectacle and celebrity culture, or the direct link between the expansion of the art market and art institutions and the massive upward transfer of wealth that has impoverished billions and bankrupted public sectors globally. It was the almost total disconnect I found between what art works are under these historical and economic conditions, and what artists, curators, critics and historians say that those art works—especially works they support—do and mean.59

Indeed, the discrepancy between what artists and institutions claim and what art actually is or does has reached a high point of contradiction. It is in this context that I want to think through Fraser’s widely discussed Untitled (2003; Figure 5.2), linking the disconnect Fraser described to how artworks are valorised and actual bodies are abstracted under capitalism.60

Andrea Fraser, Untitled, 2003. Project and video installation. Installation view, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, 2004. Courtesy of the artist.

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Andrea Fraser’s Untitled at the public/private divide

Untitled (2003) confronts contradictions. For Untitled the artist used her gallerist Friedrich Petzel to contact a collector who owned one of her works, to arrange a sexual encounter in a hotel room in order to produce a 60-minute silent video in an edition of five (including two artist proof copies), with the collector, who paid all expenses, purchasing the first. The arrangement was conducted in good faith, and the collector and Fraser did not sign an agreement. In contrast, the display of the work is contractually constrained to a monitor no larger than 30 in. that is to be exhibited on a white pedestal of matching footprint in a fully lit, empty white room, without seating, with specifications for gallery placement and size aimed, as the agreement mentions, to expose the viewer.61 The reproduction of the work’s documentation and its circulation are also highly restricted, binding the rights of every present and future owner, with regard to viewing, exhibitions, loans, broadcasts, dissemination of images, etc. This condition places great emphasis on the circulation and display of the work, distributing the focal point between the moment of the work’s production and its place in the system. I see Untitled as pushing to a summit that juncture where the body, the art object, and the museum interact, addressing the relations beyond the actors animating them, and bringing to the fore a problem of the public/private divide at the heart of the nonprofit institution, of which the art museum is an example. For this reason, I see the work as a direct continuation of, and not a break from, Fraser’s institutional critique works. Fraser herself considers the entire process, not just the video as an object, to be “the work.”62 This, I claim, binds the analysis to that of ownership and circulation such that Untitled traces the connection between two kinds of private transaction—one personal, one through the art market—to the museum. Turning the glove inside out, a sex-act is presented publicly but leaves ambiguous the question of pleasure, and the question of who is being served.63 The video itself, with its sexual content, enters obliquely into an economic constellation that relies on a division of the public and private spheres to sustain its order—to regiment its monetary and sexual economies, which Fraser has dared to probe. Art, sex, and money mediate the public and private spheres but are also part of the work’s substance. While this is most definitely a question that should be taken up through systematic (not psychologising) theories of psychoanalysis, in what follows I will map various components of this work from a Marxist perspective considering their interaction, and how they sit in relationship to the structure of the institution, expanded by feminist criticism to include the “institutions” of sexuality and the domestic domain, as cited earlier in the chapter. The work being such, the question of what the object of it is, and where it starts and stops, is central. I will examine the social

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relations of the work, consider its use of prostitution as a metaphor, and observe its hybridisation of conceptualist and feminist strategies, but mostly contextualise its status as a commodity in historical and contemporary valuetheory perspectives, to describe its position as a work of institutional critique in light of the contemporary financialisation of the art market. The structure regulating what is considered private and what public reflects a deeper-seated problem at the heart of the liberal nation-state. Economics professor Ann Davis applies Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism, where social relations are masked by the exchange of things, to show how the authority of the state to issue money, garner taxes, and guarantee debt, puts wealth appropriated from surplus labor to work for private enterprise. This authority determines international confidence in a state’s currency, and overall its viability. “This ‘national wealth’ serves to provide liquidity for private financial markets and to underwrite private credit to firms for the purposes of private profit. This is a form of exploitation of the public for private gain, on a systemic level, by means of the financial system.”64 Davis’s work can help reveal the myth that privileges extended to private enterprises are justified because they facilitate the economy for the common good or are “job creators.” If this were the case, private enterprises would share their profits with the powers that actually create value, namely workers, rather than only with those who merely enable the distribution of the value created by labor. In this inverted context, money appears as a phenomenon of the market, created strictly to facilitate transactions as a “medium of exchange.” Within this institutional setting, the role of the state is to protect private property and to maintain capitalist profitability, and to reinforce the apparent public/private divide. In this context, the state is “public” and the market is “private,” even though the market is the composite effect of social production.65

A fundamental Marxist critique of the political economy shows that money does not produce value—only abstract labor can produce value. The substance that feeds the entire system—beyond what workers put back in, in order to sustain themselves and their families—is taken out of surplus value, which is then distributed in the circuit of exchange. Davis cites Marx: “money itself is a commodity, an external object, capable of becoming the private property of any individual. Thus social power becomes the private power of private persons.”66 Money appears to be a mere mediator, but in effect it contains a social dimension—value invested in it by abstract labor power—and should therefore be social, not appropriated by private hands. Since first learning of Untitled, then seeing the images that represented the work, and viewing the actual video, I am haunted by a work that casts the die onto a set of social relations in the art circuit, and read the work as a model for asking how the individual, through money and sex, connects to

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a system that is a complex dynamic of private/public divide, where distinctions between what is private and what is public are deliberately blurred to sustain a social order that serves the needs of a ruling class. In the United States especially, the legal-fiduciary structure of museums as private/public partnerships allows for opaque transactions in the name of the public, but to which the public has no access, let alone any form of control. Yet, the nonprofit status granted to these museums is legally justified by their mandate to serve the public. In Untitled Fraser cast the (woman) artist not as a victim, but as a participant on equal footing with the collector, who, as Fraser underscored, took an enormous risk himself.67 The work is provocative not because of the sexual encounter, where with significant control over its production Fraser had relative agency, but for the subsequent valorisation of the work in an inherently exploitative system: Selling the other four DVDs to people or institutions who did not participate in their production remains much more problematic for me. They are the ones who will only be paying money for it and, with only that, take ownership of a very intimate part of me (and the participating collector as well). It will exist for them as a simple commodity, to be bought with no more than an economic risk and potentially sold at a profit in which I will have no share. For me, the “complete legal and unalterable possession” (as Barnett Newman once called it) that commodity ownership entails is much more alienating than any aspect of my encounter with the participating collector. The fact that the DVDs will increase in value immediately for buyers by virtue of their own purchase, and that this and all future appreciation is lost to me—along with the 50% taken by the dealer—is much more exploitative.68

This for me is the point of the piece, which merits the intensity of its provocation. The ways in which the sexual encounter is presented as bound to market relations reflects the limited coordinates that render relative our agency as individuals in a web of interpersonal and economic relations. No matter how powerful or established we are, our desires, intimacies, actions, and transactions have already been shaped by and within a socio-economic matrix. I am invested in the latter, and the ways in which economic relations inflect the relation of artists to their artwork, and the both to the museum and its public, of which I am one. The alienation of artists occurs where they lose control over the future display and circulation of their work. (Significantly, Art Workers’ Coalition was catalysed by the demand of Takis Vassilakis to have a say in the display of his work.) Artists rarely, if ever, benefit from their work’s resale (where most of the profits are made). Untitled echoes the alienation of all subjects under capitalism, not as a metaphor, but as a model. I am not suggesting that art is labor, or that artists are “workers,” but that even though we, professionals living

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in the Western hemisphere, have higher degrees of relative agency (relative, for example, as women have less agency than men in general and minorities are subject to oppression and exploitation, etc.), our lives are still rationalised and organised by the logic of capitalism.69 If this analysis seems to be totalising, it is, because I believe that a total system needs totalising theory and that a work that puts on display the relation of sex and money can sustain such a view.70 The work is not simply a critique of the art market, but an act of leaving a trace of the connections between the body and the subject of the artist (and also the collector), the object of the work, the market, and the nonprofit museum institution, underscoring how the private/public divide functions on a range of partnership agreement typologies, and showing where and how the pathway runs. The “art-field”—a term used by Fraser (following Bourdieu) to describe the network formed by the art market, the museum, publications, and display spaces, all enabled and inhabited by participants—is one example of the intermediary structures that intercede the state and the individual, facilitated by money and organised by regulatory institutions.71 Untitled ties the sexual transaction to the market transaction not by way of metaphor (we cannot substitute one for the other as a signifier). It is also not a critique in the simple sense of declaring that artists under capitalism prostitute themselves, but, rather, a challenge to our conception of what constitutes the art object and its status in relation to the art-field and the ways in which this typology of relations (objects and systems), this regime or social order, plays itself out through every living body. More than merely equating the gesture of sex with a collector to prostitution, Julia Bryan-Wilson considered the equivalence of labor with prostitution evoked by Marx, the collapse of the commodity with the worker suggested by Walter Benjamin, and Susan Buck-Morss’s interpretation of the latter to articulate prostitution as the original form of wage labor, and its unique condition of baring, rather than rendering invisible, the apparent relation of exploitation.72 Following this logic, prostitution is not located in the exchange between Fraser and the collector, but rather in each and every exchange of money for labor or service as a principle. Fraser has referenced Baudelaire’s statement: “What is art? Prostitution,” which implies that even a willful act of exchange is acquisitive, or that selling one’s passion is a compromise. The significance of associating the work with prostitution is not moral, but structural; the problem is located in the possibility that the price paid by the collector is ostensibly what the artist is “worth.” This is the obscenity of capitalism—the suggestion that what anyone is paid in wages is what they are worth (including the mistaken conception that workers in the Western hemisphere are paid more because they are “more productive”).73 Again, I am not suggesting that Fraser is a laborer; she was not paid for a sexual service, but for an artwork. One way to read this is that both forms of exchange are equally unjust, as in both

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cases the relation of the sum to the service or object is not a measure of it’s “worth” but a reflection of what the market allows. The amount was not set as a “price” for sex with me. It was set according to what the dealer who brokered the commission thought a single-channel videotape by Andrea Fraser produced in an edition of five would be worth at that time— irrespective of content. It was for the first exemplar of that edition that the participating collector was billed. The real question is: is that amount any less arbitrary than if it were a price put on my body for a night? Is it any less alienating? Or any less reifying? Is it any less exploitative in its insufficiency—or scandalous in its excess? And am I any less mercenary to accept it for an artwork? On the contrary, I would say I am more so.74

“Everyone was obsessed with the sum the collector paid,” Fraser recalls, and refuses to disclose it.75 The sum of the original payment is insignificant—it is the work’s inevitable appreciation that is of substance. Here I am very much in accord with Angela Dimitrakaki’s argument: In the case of the artist, the explicit intention to sell (a document of immaterial labour) implicitly accepts alienation as the “ground” of an artwork in capitalism, with the artist having chosen the form but not the conditions of her labour, which are imposed by the art market. And the work itself posits alienation as the condition that the collector must embrace in order to access the commodity, much like the artist who carefully supplies by gauging, and even pre-empting, market demand, in the full knowledge of the fact that immaterial production knows no limits with regard to what can be turned into a commodity.76

Dimitrakaki considers Untitled as a commodity in the context of immaterial labor and bio-power. Susan Cahan examined Untitled in the context of the alienation of artists from their work, in a key passage (also cited by Dimitrikaki): The relations between artist and collector have been stripped of material mediation. The social relation between Fraser and the collector is the work of art. Moreover, the collector is implicated as a participant in the creation of the work as the resulting piece is both his and the artist’s “labor.” The piece does more than merely use prostitution as a metaphor for the artist/collector relationship, it embodies a form of resistance to commodity fetishism and a reinvestment in the power of human interaction.77

There are two root difficulties with Cahan’s analysis. Firstly, we cannot simply choose where and how to bracket social relations. The social relations typified in the work include, at the very least, as Dimitrakaki argued: the mediation of the dealer, the careful selection of the collaborator, and the production of a document (the video) for sale. Additionally, I would extend the constellation of social relations to include all the actual and potential future interactions of

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the market and with museums, as each will always contain within it a kernel of the human energy invested in producing the artistic object. It is to the valorisation of this kernel that Fraser has objected, as quoted in the passages above. The regulation of the work’s representation, circulation, display, and acquisition are clearly part of the social relations within which it exists, and that the conditions of presentation and distribution are part of the work foregrounds this fact. Moreover, as we shall see at the end of this analysis, “the institution” is well aware that exchange is part of what the work is. Secondly, Cahan’s statement that human interaction can offer resistance to commodity fetishism seems, for lack of a better term, naïve. Untitled cannot resolve alienation because good will or amenable relations between individuals cannot resolve systematic problems, just as my successful relationship with my heterosexual male partner is not a model for resolving the oppression of women—we still need methodical feminist analysis and action. It is significant, and perhaps the reason that Cahan foregrounded Fraser’s relationship with her collaborator as the instance of social relations, that Fraser chose to forego a contractual agreement with him, and based the entire interaction on trust. We will come full circle to the favorable outcome of this choice later, but it is important to underscore again that all other future circulation and exhibition of the work is bound by a contract, signaling that all other social relations are indeed in need of regulation. The trust established with one individual at the moment of production is not an answer to the set of problems the work points out, it is rather an outcome of the intelligence and emotional maturity of the parties involved, just as it is of pure luck. We cannot deduce from the match to the game. At this point of analysis, it is a question of when the particular is an instance of situated knowledge that can circle back to the universal, and when it is an outlier. For example, the “particular” political referent Deutsche identifies in Haacke’s poll (Rockefeller in this case) is an instance that can be applied back to understanding a systematic condition. Or, our ability to abstract from Mary Kelly’s relationship with her son in Post Partum Document (1973–79), as addressed in Chapter 3, is because Kelly’s analysis was sustained over the course of six years, during which the imbrication of both mother and son, as categories, was examined in relation to multiple systems with (and within) which they interacted. An encounter with one collaborator cannot be prototypical. The overall work is. Of course, it is here that Untitled is even more complicated, and should be crossed with Fraser’s investment in Frankfurt School discourse and a feminist critique of psychoanalysis (in the milieu of Screen journal). However, if we are to submit the work to Marxist analysis we need to remain consistent regarding the method. One way to think of the work as a set of concentric social relations is to understand its relation to the commodity object. Fraser explained that: “as

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a limited edition video, ‘Untitled’ is sold and is thus destined to circulate as a commodity. The fact that it’s a commodity is important because the piece is about the art commodity, you know, so it’s got to be a commodity. But I can try to control that circulation contractually.”78 The contractual control of the work is thus significant since it is the stress point that renders the extent and the limits of the artist’s agency, where she loses control over the valorisation of her work and its meaning (and the same goes for the image of her body).79 This element of the work inevitably ties it to the critique of artistic activity and working relations in the legacy of Conceptual Art—however, here extended and applied to the body of the artist, not just to the object.80 Fraser brought feminist perspectives (the cultural and the analytic, previously considered contradictory) to bear on Conceptual Art and institutional critique. Comparing an example of the capitalist system with aspects of the patriarchal matrix, Untitled was a synthesis of conceptualist traditions (including the conceptualist feminism of Mary Kelly) and the feminist body art of artists like Carolee Schneemann and Hannah Wilke who strategically positioned their bodies as subject to the gaze. In the 1970s, body art by women such as Wilke and Schneeman was criticised by radical feminists for being narcissistic and catering to the domain of male sexual desire.81 Placing their work in a broad perspective, Amelia Jones argued that Hannah Wilke’s activation of female narcissism was neither passive nor indulgent in nature, but rather that it deliberately conflated subject and object towards a critique of the objectification of women.82 Jones showed how Wilke established a critical distance from a mere enactment of narcissism by externalising a rhetoric of the female pose, doubling the alienation of the reflected image while strategically reiterating traits and thus exposing their artificiality. Reading narcissism through the original Greek Narcissus myth (utilised by Freud and Lacan in developing their theories of psychoanalysis), Jones analysed “the male gaze” as a register of vision organised by a patriarchal order. She argued that in Wilke’s willful solicitation of this gaze, the artist “[grafts] it onto and into her body/self, taking hold of it and reflecting it back to expose and exacerbate its reciprocity.”83 In this reciprocity of roles the artist excludes the male gaze, and through her strategic reiteration of the conventions of social intercourse, disallows patriarchy and art criticism to constitute her subjectivity or validate her work. Joan Copjec interpreted the Lacanian definition of the gaze differently, as embodied in the cinematic screen itself rather than emanating from the subject’s eye.84 While vision undoubtedly plays a constituting role in the case of Untitled, to relegate the meaning of the work to its visual provocation at this historical moment is to surrender to cultural ubiquity—tantalising images are everywhere.85 I have no use for this work in that capacity. In an art context, the work brings to the surface the meeting of feminist performance art with the

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minimalist and conceptualist undergirding logic where the agreement and the transaction were the site of the artistic gesture. Conceptualism aimed to negate the visuality of painting and its commodity status as an object, foregrounding context as a mode to criticise art commerce. Untitled extends conceptualist critique and updates it, because, in today’s market-driven art world, the transaction has superseded even painting in importance. Ironically, today’s art market has subjected painting to another type of attack: the spectacle nowadays revolves around not what a painting looks like, but what it has been sold for and the celebrity culture that engulfs it. Painting is closer to money than it has ever been—singularity has been replaced by fungibility. The task of conceptualist and critical work is necessarily changed, and the relation of artwork to commodity needs to be reconsidered. The autonomy of the art object from the commodity was central to the avant-garde movement since the debates of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s. Stewart Martin set the historical stage: On the one hand, autonomous art appears as the product, effect or symptom of “high” capitalism: autonomous art effectively comes into being with commodification, which frees certain products from their heteronomous determination by the church, state or other forms of patronage, and, through the indeterminacy of their ultimate buyer, such works acquire an independent sense of their end and value. Autonomous art is thus an ornament of capitalist culture. On the other hand, there is the position that autonomous art is destroyed by developed capitalism. According to this view, the development of commodification as a general principle of society reduces all values to exchange-value, including the value of art, and thereby destroys art’s autonomy. Capitalist culture is consequently the death of autonomous art. This conflict may be discerned in the stand-offs familiar in contemporary discussions of art: Debord versus Greenberg, Bürger versus Adorno.86

Martin also assessed that: “art’s resistance to its commodification is therefore sustained as a lament.” In “Art Good, Market Evil? Isabelle Graw on False Polarities and Economic Subtexts” (2015), Graw confirmed that the question still circulates as a moral issue, challenging the alarmist voices that render the corrupting influence of today’s market on art as if art was a pure binary opposite.87 Importantly, this is not a moral, but a structural issue. Untitled is most certainly not a lament of art’s commodification or a moralising gesture, but a curious return to the commodity by an artist who has devoted her career to negotiating critical practices without it. Why a return to the commodity now, at a moment when art market relations have been thoroughly systematised to a point of an exacerbation? If Conceptual Art still proposed a solution to the lament of modernism, along the lines of resistance to commodification logic, and feminism contended

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that commodification’s reach was far wider by addressing the private sphere, perhaps the problem today is not the question of whether art is or is not a commodity, but rather how to describe what kind of position it holds or sustains in relation to the commodity as a typology of object or transaction that mediates (or masks) social relations. The feminist works I have identified in this book as extending synthetic propositions, posit not the autonomy of the artwork but, rather, the dependency of the art object and its meaning on the context of the world outside of the subject or the art object. In his recent book Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics, Dave Beech rigorously walked the reader through the history and theory of how and when art becomes commodified, explaining that this takes place at the second stage of (merchant) capital circulation, not at the level of its production, as does the systematically produced commodity.88 In a short piece, Daniel Spaulding handed us the treasure without the map, arguing that art functions under a different law of value than the commodity. Spaulding underscored that capitalist production is rationalised and organised to maximise profit. The critical point for Spaulding is that commodity prices are regulated by competition, which pushes production to become more efficient (by automation, and the regulation of labor), and drives prices down. The logic of art does not correspond with this law, as the price of works by one artist can never cause the prices of another to lower. The artwork instead derives its price from specific monopoly-rights, i.e. the name of the artist associated with the work, and hence art is akin to a luxury commodity.89 Yet, that the logic of art’s production is distinct from that of the commodity does not sever their connection, and the difficulty is to describe how their circulation behaves within a system that syphons value created in the production of regular commodities, but that does not begin or end on that level. Michael Heinrich configures the luxury commodity in a different manner: Whether my labor is productive is not dependent upon the character of the use value produced, but upon whether I produce a commodity that also contains surplus value … Not only material products but services, insofar as they are sold, are commodities. In a capitalist theater, the actors are therefore just as much “productive laborers” as steelworkers who work in a capitalist steel mill. Whether or not a particular article is “really” useful for the reproduction of society also does not play any role in determining its character as a commodity. A luxury yacht, a video commercial, or tanks are all commodities if they find a buyer. And if these are produced under capitalist conditions the labor expended during their production is “productive labor.”90

The tough question, meticulously taken up by Beech, is whether art should be considered to be productive or unproductive labor, in other words, does

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the labor that goes into it contribute to the overall aggregate of value. The tendency is to conclude that artmaking is not productive labor. Art is therefore not a regular commodity, but an object that belongs to the realm of the distribution and storage of value (created elsewhere). Under these conditions, Untitled, as a work of art nested in an object, is therefore such a “special commodity,” a commodity not by production, but by circulation. I see Untitled as a work of institutional critique because the contractual controls, implemented by Fraser, at the work’s point of meeting with the market and the display institution, emphasise over time the process of the work’s circulation, making visible its coordinates on the gyre of commerce. Through the pane of Fraser’s choices, it is hard not to see, emerging as a backdrop, the global shift from industrial to financial economy. Not only a special commodity, the changing economic status of the art object should now alter its relation to the nonprofit institution. Art has undergone a process of financialisation. Transformed from being an expensive status symbol, an illiquid property realised only at the moment of its sale, to a vehicle in a market of art-financing and investment, the art object has been turned into a relatively liquid asset. This process, namely its monetisation, has been expanding exponentially, with micro industries of insurance and hedging further developed, essentially financialising the art object.91 There have been many speculations about why, but the growth of the art market is a fact. We see this concretely in the ballooning of art funds, art financial services firms, and media coverage on the art market’s goings-on. Yet these developments have been made possible only through the more widespread and interrelated changes in the global economy at large (at least up to the latest economic meltdown). These include an extended period of corporate profitability and equity market appreciation, dating to the mid-1960s, that has encouraged large scale investments in the infrastructure of the art market (from galleries and museums to fairs, biennials, and ancillary services); widening levels of income disparity, most acute and disproportionate at the top end of the earnings spectrum, setting the bedrock for new art buyers; the winning out over privatization over public-sector subsidizing, inspiring greater innovation for artists and arts institutions to make ends meet; and lastly, leading on from each of these points, the preeminence of finance, which has yielded new ways of thinking about and conducting business across diverse economic sectors, including, though hardly limited to, art. The net effect is that more money, from more places, has poured into the art market than ever before, inspiring ever more creative ways to put this capital to work.92

The result is the early twenty-first-century boom in art investment we are witnessing now, where art is a vehicle in the market of money.93 Art today is

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no longer merely a static store of value but also a monetisable asset. Assessing art’s prospects for securitisation, Jaclyn McLean explained: According to Michael Moses, one of the founders of the Mei-Moses Index, although art returns are slightly more unpredictable than the S&P 500 stock index, “it provides potentially good diversification for a portfolio, and it would be silly to ignore it.” As a result of the Mei-Moses analysis of the long-term price development of artwork, it has been projected that an investment portfolio that includes artwork provides a better risk-to-return tradeoff. Although there may be a greater risk associated with investing in art rather than stocks, the returns are greater. This is a result of the fact that the art market is informationally inefficient. However, this inefficiency creates possibilities of generating alpha returns. This may be very attractive to some investors who wish to exploit the inefficient market.94

That art is a special type commodity can also be gauged empirically, for as McLean further showed, it still cannot be securitised (as opposed to music, for example, which can translate into futures, as in the well-known example of Bowie-bonds). Precisely because the art investment market is informationally inefficient and unpredictable (because art is a special commodity), it can offer tremendous advantages for insiders, or those who have the power to influence art’s symbolic value.95 The potential to influence prices puts art professionals such as critics, historians, and especially curators and museum personnel at the epicentre of art’s profit-making potential. The entire market for art and the ability of art to function as a value-store is dependent upon its cultural, symbolic, or social value, sustained by an art-field and dependent on the museum and its authority. The difference today is the volume of the market for contemporary art and the fact that nonprofit museums are displaying and accessioning contemporary art by living artists on a historically unprecedented scale, as opposed to the limited quantities of rare objects in the past.96 Museums and nonprofit art institutions should, therefore, be divorced from commerce for structural, not moral, reasons. There is a clear conflict of interest when art collectors sit on museum boards or collecting committees, where they have advance knowledge on upcoming exhibits, or where they can influence programming or acquisitions that will benefit their asset holdings directly or indirectly.97 The same public in the name of which these museums are granted their nonprofit status is symbolically exploited to serve the wealth of museum donors and inadvertently support the market. Between the matrices of the body and the social order Untitled inhabits a (dis)comfort zone that renders all of us complicit in leaving the private/ public blur intact, and the machine running. Fraser has been blunt about

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these facts, and has written about the contradictions and hypocrisies manifesting on the individual and institutional ends.98 The Whitney Museum of American Art, for example, has eagerly housed work by Fraser that directly criticised its very foundations, as seen in the example given in Chapter 4. Furthermore, in 2012, in lieu of a contribution to that year’s Biennial, Fraser published “There’s No Place Like Home,” where she outlined her personal connection to the Whitney, as well as to some of the patrons of this institution where she had both studied and exhibited. She then reproached the contemporary art-field for the ways in which it benefits directly from the escalation of extreme inequality.99 Untitled inevitably sheds light on how the museum sustains its contradictions. In 2014 the Whitney Museum accessioned Untitled, a consequence of a transaction brokered by Fraser, and for which she received a fee. This time, it was the collector who invited Fraser, thus extending their collaboration. Acknowledging the deal as part of the piece the museum’s Handbook of the Collection explains: “This DVD was acquired from the participating collector as a partial gift and partial purchase, an arrangement negotiated by the artist, and another step in a sequence of exchanges that constitutes the work.”100 Coming from the official voice of the institution, it is evident that the institution recognises that the boundaries of the work do not begin and end with the object. Indeed, artists should always benefit from future transactions that involve their work, and it would be ideal if museums could extend this type of support to a variety of practices.101 On a personal level, the transaction signals the ethical relationship between the artist and the collector. On a systematic level, it is an example of how things should be done, and what policy could be. Accessioned into the collection Untitled now marks the difference between the personal transaction it includes and the lack of any systematic application of such ethics towards all other works of art and services by artists. In ensuring that museum accession will always be “another step in a sequence of exchanges that constitutes the work,” Untitled begs the question: will the Whitney extend this ethical right to all other artworks? Will it pay artists for works that are service-based commodities?102 In this way Untitled has put on display the shortcomings of a nonprofit museum institution that does not have a structure in place to properly care for the artists that create its content. Untitled offers an example of several permutations of how artworks and bodies move through art’s economy and regime of representation, allowing a peek into what are ordinarily two opaque domains: the sex act and the museum acquisition. Yet, by allowing this glimpse, it also renders, as negative space, those areas of opacity hidden from the public eye. All this is not to point to the failure of institutional critique as a practice; we cannot expect a single artist or artwork to upset the system. Fraser’s and Haacke’s practices

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are not moralising but rather pragmatic, applying pressure to the institution not as a terminal solution, but periodically as a system of checks and balances. The propositions extended in institutional critique can now become a template for museum practice, as well as for the interaction of artists with the institutions and markets that engulf them. Just as Marxism cannot be administered as a topical solution, institutional critique is not a dressing to be applied once, but a practice needed on an on-going basis. Notes 1 Ann E. Davis, “The New ‘Voodoo Economics’: Fetishism and the Public/Private Divide,” Review of Radical Political Economics 45, no. 1 (2012), 43. 2 Curated by Kate Linker and Jane Weinstock, “Difference: On Representation and Sexuality” (1984) is discussed in Chapter 4. 3 From “Hal Foster interviews Silvia Kolbowski,” in Silvia Kolbowski: inadequate … Like … Power, eds. Rosalyn Deutsche et al. (Vienna: Vienna Secession, 2005), 157. 4 Reprinted in Ti-Grace Atkinson, “The Institution of Sexual Intercourse,” in Amazon Odyssey (New York: Links, 1974), 13–24. 5 Brian Wallis, ‘artist entry’, in Kynaston McShine, The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 154. 6 Noah Horowitz, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 7 Clare McAndrew, “An Introduction to Art and Finance,” in Fine Art and High Finance: Expert Advice on the Economics of Ownership, ed. Clare McAndrew (New York: Bloomberg Press, 2010), 1–30. James Tarmy, “The Dangers of Investing in Art.” Bloomberg News (February 12, 2015), http://bloomberg.com/ news/articles/2015–02–12/the-dangers-of-investing-in-art-anselm-reyle-sdecline. 8 Bijan Khezri, “The New Art of Art Finance,” Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2007. 9 On the speculative boom see Tony Norfield, “Derivatives and Capitalist Markets: The Speculative Heart of Capital,” Historical Materialism 20, no. 1 (2012): 117. Norfield frames the domination of capitalism as an imperialist project. 10 Horowitz, Art of the Deal, 147. 11 John C. Welchman ed. Institutional Critique and After (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2006). 12 Hal Foster, “Subversive Signs,” in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985), 100; Victor Burgin, “Situational Aesthetics,” Studio International (October 1969): 118–121. Also see Judith Aminoff and Claude Gintz, “Michael Asher and the Transformation of ‘Situational Aesthetics,’” October 66 (Autumn 1993): 113–131. Fraser also mentions as formative: Benjamin Buchloh, “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art,” Artforum 1 (September 1982): 43–56. 13 For a select bibliography on the subject see: Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Julia Bryan-Wilson, “A Curriculum of Institutional Critique,” in New Institutionalism, ed. Jonas Ekeberg (Oslo: OCA/verksted, 2003), 89–109.

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14 Andrea Fraser, “In and Out of Place: Louise Lawler,” Art in America 73 (June 1985): 122–129. 15 Fraser et al., “Feminism and Art: Nine Views,” Artforum 42 (October 2003): 142. Also see Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988). 16 Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” Artforum 44 (September 2005): 283. 17 Frazer Ward, “The Haunted Museum: Institutional Critique and Publicity,” October 73 (Summer 1995): 71–89. 18 Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Hans Haacke’s Paperwork,” in Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), 173–213. 19 Haacke recalls the voting statistics: “During its twelve-week run, the Information show had 299,057 visitors. 12.4 per cent of them participated in the poll, 68.7 per cent dropped their ballots into the ‘No’ box, indicating their opposition to Nelson Rockefeller; and 37.3 per cent voted in his favour.” Hans Haacke, “Lessons Learned,” Tate Papers 12 (2009), www.tate.org.uk/download/file/fid/7265.2009. 20 Oral history with Jon Hendricks and Mr. Jean Toche, December 13, 1972, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Also see: Guerrilla Art Action Group, “A Call for the Immediate Resignation of All of the Rockefellers from the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art,” in Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writing, eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 86. 21 The program is archived https://art.base.co/event/4437-performance-program. 22 Hans Haacke, “Museums as Managers of Consciousness,” in Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 60–72. Rudolf Baranik et al., An Anti-Catalog (New York: The Catalog Committee of Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, 1977). With Jimmy [sic] Durham contributing “Mr. Catlin and Mr. Rockefeller Tame the Wilderness,” and Gerald Horne collaborating on “Black Art and Historical Omission,” the “anti-catalog” was a protest response of Artists Meeting for Cultural Change against the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition of the Rockefeller collection, detailing in clear terms the ways in which official culture serves the agenda of the upper class. http://primaryinformation.org/index.php?/projects/ anti-catalog. 23 Rosalyn Deutsche, “Hans Haacke and The Art of Not Being Governed Quite So Much,” In Culture and Contestation in the New Century, ed. Marc James Léger (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2011), 35. 24 Deutsche, “Hans Haacke,” 33. 25 It could be argued that these subtleties may have been lost on the viewers of the show. However, this does not negate the first level of reading, which simply activates participatory democracy, or the fact that a work’s reception is on-going. 26 Vered Maimon, “The Third Citizen: On Models of Criticality in Contemporary Artistic Practice,” October 129 (Summer 2009): 85–112. 27 Hans Haacke, Proposal, in Kynaston McShine Information Exhibition Research, [INFO. N.37]. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

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28 John B. Hightower, interview by Sharon Zane, 1996, MoMA Archives, 27, www. moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/learn/archives/transcript_hightower.pdf. The censorship of the Diego Rivera mural at the Rockefeller Center, commissioned in 1932 and destroyed in 1934, by John D. Rockefeller Jr., also comes to mind. 29 Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis,” Marxist Perspectives 1, no. 4 (1978): 30. 30 Haacke, “Lessons Learned.” Haacke recounts several incidents, the most dramatic being the cancelation of his 1971 Guggenheim show. 31 Francis Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 113. 32 Correspondence between Haacke and Guggenheim director Thomas Messer reproduced in John Henry Merryman et al., eds., Law, Ethics, and the Visual Arts (New York: Kluwer Law International, 2002). 33 Marcia Tucker Papers, Getty Research Institute Special Collections (Box 8, fo.1) 34 Bryan-Wilson, “Hans Haacke’s Paperwork,” 176. 35 Les Levine, “The Information Fall-Out,” Studio International 181, no. 934 (June 1971): 266. 36 Eve Meltzer, “The Dream of the Information World,” Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 1 (2006): 126. 37 Although it opened first, the planning of “Information” followed that of “Software” (1970), curated by Jack Burnham for the Jewish Museum. The concerns of the two overlapped in that much of the art was responding to the widespread influence of General Systems Theory. 38 Luke Skrebowski, “All Systems Go: Recovering Hans Haacke’s Systems Art,” Grey Room 30 (Winter 2008): 54–83. 39 Howard S. Becker and John Walton, “Social Science and the Work of Hans Haacke,” in Hans Haacke: Framing and Being Framed: 7 Works, 1970–75 (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 145–153. 40 Becker and Walton, “Social Science and the Work of Hans Haacke,” 149–150. 41 Rosalind E. Krauss, “Forms of Readymade: Duchamp and Brancusi,” in Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 79. 42 Fredric Jameson, “Hans Haacke and the Cultural Logic of Postmodernism”, in Hans Haacke, Unfinished Business, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 47. 43 Carla Cugini, ed., Andrea Fraser: Texts, Scripts, Transcripts (Köln: Walther König, 2013). 44 On the relation between the critique of artistic autonomy and formal, institutional, economic, or political instrumentalisation see Andrea Fraser, “What’s Intangible, Transitory, Mediating, Participatory, and Rendered in the Public Sphere? Part II,” in Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser, ed. Alexander Alberro (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 55–80. Fraser also explains the service model as a type of artistic practice and its institutionalisation. 45 Andrea Fraser, Visiting Artist Lecture (California State University Long Beach, February 24, 2010). 46 Andrea Fraser, Public Program (Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, May 8, 2008).

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47 Art as service provision of course does not mean art without form. George Baker analysed her layered practice of references and positioning. See George Baker, “Fraser’s Form,” in Andrea Fraser: Works 1984 to 2003, ed. Yilmaz Dziewior (Cologne: Dumont, 2003), 50–77. 48 “Interested” refers to individuals with a vested interest or agenda. For an explanation on how it is that these private individuals come to influence the museums that they serve in their philanthropic capacities see my article “Splitting the Public and Private Uses of Art,” Counterpunch, February 20, 2015. 49 In Fraser, “In and Out of Place: Louise Lawler.” 50 Andrea Fraser, “Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk,” October 57 (Summer 1991): 105–122. 51 Parts of this section were first published in my “91, 92, 93—Returns: Andrea Fraser, Simon Leung, Lincoln Tobier,” in Rabble, eds. Holly Myers and Mathew Timmons (Los Angeles: Insert Blanc Press 2015), unpaginated, which addressed the exhibition 91 92 93, curated by Simon Leung for MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House (January 5 – February 11, 2011), and where I saw Fraser perform May I Help You? Several iterations of the performance exist. First staged with actors Ledlie Borgerhoff, Kevin Duffy, and Randolph Miles at American Fine Arts Co., New York, February 1991, for an exhibition produced in cooperation with Allan McCollum; performance at Orchard, New York, May 2005, in an exhibition that also included works by McCollum, and where she also created a film collaboration with filmmaker Jeff Preiss entitled ORCHARD Document: May I Help You?; and another recorded at the Schindler House. Also see André Rottman, “Complicity and Contestation: André Rottmann on Andrea Fraser at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne,” Texte zur Kunst 90 (June 2013): 228–233. 52 For more on Fraser’s use of montage, see James Meyer, “The Strong and the Weak: Andrea Fraser and the Conceptual Legacy,” Grey Room 17 (Fall 2004): 82–107. 53 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Routledge and Harvard, 1984 [Les Editions de Minuit, 1979]). Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). Bourdieu’s work is referenced throughout Fraser’s Museum Highlights, 2005. 54 Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), 121. 55 The full transcript of May I Help You (1991), is cited on Allan McCollum’s website, http://allanmccollum.net/allanmcnyc/fraser/mayihelpyou.html. 56 Fraser, May I Help You. 57 Fraser, May I Help You. 58 The corporatisation of the American museum is not a new issue; however, by the twenty-first century it has been radically exacerbated. Jordan Kantor explained the flight into the academy of intellectuals who had previously worked in museums: “While these curators’ specific reasons for accepting academic positions are doubtless as diverse as their aesthetic sensibilities, one might reasonably argue that the relocations are a consequence of three aspects of the broader transformation of

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the art world: the meteoric rise of the contemporary art market; a shift in the role of the curator within large institutions; and the evolution of museums toward a more administrative model (at least in the United States).” Kantor, “Back to School: Jordan Kantor on Curatorial Returns to the Academy,” Artforum International 45, no. 7 (March 2007): 129. See also Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum.”October 54 (Autumn 1990): 3–17. Michael Brenson, “The Guggenheim, Corporate Populism, and the Future of the Corporate Museum,” in Acts of Engagement: Writings on Art, Criticism, and Institutions, 1993–2002 (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2004), 277–297, and Ben Davis, “The Museum Bubble,” Artnet (2009), www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/davis/museumbubble8–7-09.asp. 59 Andrea Fraser, “Speaking of the Social World … ” Texte zur Kunst 81 (2011): 154. 60 It is potentially problematic to use “valorisation” to describe the appreciation, even the leveraging, of art. I am aware that my use here is somewhat metaphoric. 61 I thank Andrea Fraser for sharing with me her agreement documents. 62 Fraser 2008, and Fraser 2010, and repeated in two of the interviews cited below, notes 67 and 68. 63 Ambiguity is suggested by Rhea Anastas, “The Scene of Production,” Artforum International 52, no. 3 (November 2013): 235–236, 310. 64 Davis, “The New ‘Voodoo Economics’,” 48. 65 Davis, “The New ‘Voodoo Economics’,” 46. 66 Davis, “The New ‘Voodoo Economics’,” 46. (“Marx 1967: vol. I, p. 132”.) 67 Fraser in conversation with Bordowitz: “In that encounter, the participating collector was less a buyer or a john than a collaborator without whom that work could not have been made. He contributed not only by entering into an economic but also an interpersonal and a physical exchange, and finally, by performing in front of the camera himself, along with me. I’ve said that what he paid for the DVD was a lot more than money. He paid with his body just as I did. He paid by taking a huge personal risk. The level of exposure involved in doing this work has been terrifying for me at times. My life is built for these kinds of risks. His is not.” Gregg Bordowitz, and Andrea Fraser, “What do we want from art, anyway? A conversation,” Artwurl.org by Carlos Motta (email exchange, unpaginated, 2004), http://carlosmotta.com/artwurl/pdf/INT026.pdf. 68 Fraser reiterates this sentiment in: Andrea Fraser and The Brooklyn Rail (Praxis: Delia Bajo and Brainard Carey), “In Conversation,” 2005, www.brooklynrail.org/ 2004/10/art/andrea-fraser. 69 Endnotes, “The Moving Contradiction: The Systematic Dialectic Of Capital As A Dialectic Of Class Struggle,” Endnotes 3. http://endnotes.org.uk/en/endnotes-themoving-contradiction. This article describes the machinations of capitalisms’ totalising powers. I reference it and also point to the entire body of work by the collective Endnotes and their compelling Marxist analysis of how capitalism infiltrates all aspects of life. 70 I am using this term here along the lines theorised by Abigail Bakan: “The emphasis is not on totality as purely universalistic, but as a contradictory totality that depends upon both difference and its opposite: the overcoming of difference through solidarity.” Abigail B. Bakan, “Marxism and Antiracism: Rethinking the

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Politics of Difference,” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture and Society 20, no. 2 (2008): 239. 71 On the history and function of the museum as a regulation and reform institution see Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995). 72 See Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Dirty Commerce: Art Work and Sex Work since the 1970s,” d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 23, no. 2 (2012): 71–112. Bryan-Wilson cites Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978); Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973). 73 John Smith, “The Purchasing Power Anomaly and the Productivity Paradox,” in Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016): 167–186. 74 Bordowitz and Fraser, “What do we want from art, anyway?” 75 Andrea Fraser and the Brooklyn Rail. It is important to underscore that the sum reported by the New York Times is not factual: Guy Trebay, “Sex, Art and Videotape,” New York Times, June 13, 2004. 76 Angela Dimitrakaki, “Labour, Ethics, Sex and Capital: On Biopolitical Production in Contemporary Art,” n.paradoxa 28 (July 2011): 171. 77 Susan E. Cahan, “Regarding Andrea Fraser’s Untitled,” Social Semiotics 16, no. 1 (April 2006), 9. 78 Fraser, Andrea Fraser and the Brooklyn Rail. 79 According to the artist, the reception of the work by the media was its most traumatic aspect. Personal communication February 2, 2015. 80 Seth Siegelaub, “The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer And Sale Agreement (1971),” Leonardo 6 (1973): 347–350. The agreement was developed by Siegelaub with the lawyer Bob Projansky to protect the rights of artists. Siegelaub developed the idea following an open hearing at the New York School of Visual Arts on April 10, 1969 where the prompt was: “What Should Be the Program of The Art Workers Regarding Museum Reform, and to Establish the Program of the Art Workers’ Coalition.” 81 Lucy Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: European and American Women’s Body Art,” in From the Center: Feminist Essays in Women’s Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), 121–138. 82 Amelia Jones, “The Rhetoric of the Pose, Hannah Wilke and the Radical Narcissism of Feminist Body Art,” in Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 151–196. 83 Jones, “The Rhetoric of the Pose,” 181 84 Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). This point has been emphasised by Juli Carson in “That Obscure Object of Gender: Kerry Tribe’s Critical Mass,” conference paper, Congrès International d’Histoire de l’Art, 2012, Nuremburg, 2012. 85 Shot from the point of view of a surveillance camera, the relative distance of the viewer from the event distinguishes it from standard pornography, and although

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association with cam-porn, voyeuristic, and internet-age pornography is somewhat present, the latter tends to build on proximity to the personal-computer camera, here absent. 86 Stewart Martin, “The Absolute Artwork Meets the Absolute Commodity,” Radical Philosophy 146 (2007): 17. 87 Incidentally Graw confirms that: “It is worth pointing out, in any case, that art works that do well in the market sphere may, in fact, be irrelevant in the eyes of artists and art historians.” Isabel Graw, “Art Good, Market Evil? Isabelle Graw on False Polarities and Economic Subtexts,” Texte zur Kunst, May 6, 2015, www. textezurkunst.de/articles/art-good-market-evil/. 88 David Beech, Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (Boston: Brill, 2015). 89 Daniel Spaulding and Nicole Demby, “Art, Value, And The Freedom Fetish,” Mute 28 (May 2015), www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/art-value-and-freedom-fetish-0. 90 Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, trans. Alexander Locascio (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 122. 91 See several of the articles collected in McAndrew, ed., Fine Art and High Finance. 92 Horowitz, Art of the Deal, 7. 93 The sums are dizzying. Based on a report compiled by art-market specialist Clare McAndrew who processes data from dealers, auction houses, art, and antique collectors; art and financial databases; and industry experts, the global art market achieved total sales of $63.8 billion in 2015. This actually represents an approximated 7% decline from 2014. See Eileen Kinsella, What Does TEFAF 2016 Art Market Report Tell Us About the Global Art Trade? Artnet March 9, 2016, https://news.artnet. com/market/tefaf-2016-art-market-report-443615. The art market did not grow organically, but in the hands of auctions houses and banks offering advisory services, teaching potential investors how to collect, and extending credit or other financial products. See my “Something out of Nothing: Marcia Tucker, Jeffrey Deitch and the De-regulation of the Contemporary-Museum Model,” Art & Education (2012), www.artandeducation.net/paper/something-out-of-nothing-marcia-tucker-jeffreydeitch-and-the-de-regulation-of-the-contemporary-museum-model/. A gradual spread of boutique financial and advising services is lowering the threshold for consignment and short-term loans, increasing the volume of transactions (loan insurances, hedging, etc.), and the potential liquidity of more types of art assets. ArtAssure Ltd., have recently lowered their starting point art price from $1 million to $250,000, making the service so much more accessible. See ArtAssure ltd., “ArtAssure Now Offering Art Loans from $250,000 to $250,000,000,” (2013), www. artassure.com/artassure-now-offering-art-loans-from-250000-and-up/. 94 Jaclyn McLean, “Finance Nouveau: Prospects for the Securitization of Art,” New Mexico Law Review 38, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 561–585. 95 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 241–258. 96 “More new museums were created between 2000 and 2015 than during the entire 19th and 20th centuries.” Cited in “The Art Market in 2014,” Art Price AMMA (2014), 6, http://imgpublic.artprice.com/pdf/rama2014_en.pdf.

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97 Andrew M. Goldstein, “Collector Alain Servais on Insider Trading in the Art Market, Blood-Sucking Leeches, and Why We’re Now Just the Fashion Industry,” Artspace, May 23, 2015, www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/alainservais-interview-part-2. Although unruly and including unverifiable statements, this article nevertheless points to practices widely known to be taking place and that may very well be considered to constitute breach of public trust when enacted by “trustees” of public-private partnership museums that benefit from tax exempt status. 98 Fraser pointed the correlation between art collecting and the rise of global inequality. See Fraser, L’1%, C’est Moi, 2012, http://whitney.org/file_columns/0002/9848/ andreafraser_1_2012whitneybiennial.pdf. 99 Fraser, “There’s No Place Like Home,” in Whitney Biennial 2012, eds. Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), 28–33. 100 Dana Miller and Adam D. Weinberg, Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015), 140. A partial-gift is when a part of the work is donated to the institution so that the museum can acquire the work well below its market value. 101 I cannot fully explore here the question of Droit de suite, rights to fee on future sales of artworks, as it clashes in the United States, at least, by first-sale doctrine, but clearly the work points to them as present and debatable problems. 102 As of July 2016 the Whitney is not yet certified, as several institutions already are, by Working Artists and the Greater Economy, an advocacy group for artist rights to fees for the display of their work and artistic services, and of which Fraser is a member. www.wageforwork.com/certification/6/w.a.g.e.-certified-

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A state of passionate detachment: Charles Gaines by way of conclusion

I use color not as an affective gesture but as a code to establish difference. But the color (dealing with sense) is emotive in relation to the object (that is, it contributes poetically to the meaning of the object). I believe this poetic meaning is as much a function of the system as it is the object, thus, what is being represented, an object?/system? Both separately? I believe one cannot be separated from the other, certainly it is not a representation of both separately, but both as a uni-form, as an integration, a synthesis. (Charles Gaines)1 While the term “identity” still causes alarm when it precedes art, there is now arguably a basic comfort with the idea that different artists have different bodies and come from different places, and that those experiences influence their works. (Malik Gaines)2

Radical theorists on the Left mostly considered identity politics to be a reformist program—an appeal by minorities to become part of the system, a weak position easily subsumed by the nation-state apparatus as in the example of the gay community’s battle for marriage equality.3 The plight of racial/ethnic/sexual minority or gender-based groups that stemmed from Civil Rights was seen to be supporting the operation of their own exclusion. Identity-based appeal to the nation-state structure for equal status and treatment was considered inadequate for profound social change, as it failed to address the state’s alliance with capitalism. Many radical Leftists also believed that resolving class stratification and the underlying exploitation of labor would lead to the abolition of racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. Often assumed, but rarely stated as such, this perspective has influenced formalist, social, and poststructuralist art history, perpetuating an atmosphere of anti-identity politics with much-confused consequences. Conceived as an anti-subjective and therefore an anti-idenitiarian mechanism, in many ways Conceptual Art came to epitomise a Left-leaning outlook within the history of art, despite the many challenges to its claims. Aiming to intervene into the structure of art’s meaning, Conceptual artists attempted to

Charles Gaines by way of conclusion

undo foundational categories of what constitutes artmaking. For them, and for the historians who supported them, this was the political gesture. It was a universalising approach, mostly without recourse to the specificities from which it was abstracting. A broader conceptualism that followed “Conceptual Art” recognised that the foundations of art—processes and procedures of artmaking, forms, materials, or art’s context—are neither equivalent to the root structure of society (and therefore hardly universal), nor a tool to allow artists to rid themselves of their subjectivity. It had also become evident that just like identity, Conceptual Art could be bought and sold.4 The synthesis of positions that followed, since the 1970s, offered an array of nuanced ways to approach the intertwining of concept-based approaches and those tied to identity politics, forming a historical trajectory from ostensibly pure forms to hybrid attitudes, from disciplinary-based work to interdisciplinarity, and also an approach to practice that continued to be relevant as a living model, able to respond to the necessities of contemporaneous concerns. Manifold artists took identity politics to influence both their ways of working and the subject matter of their practice. Throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, a broad strand of identity politics synthesised a critique of ideology with a critique of the formation of the subject and modes of identification, developing identity politics as both a strategy to consolidate political activity and at the same time a way of activating a critique of identity.5 As models of artmaking, the practices addressed in this book reflect the ways numerous artists understood the double-bind of identity as both an external category imposed on the subject and as such, a site of oppression, and its strategic existence as a site for consolidating community and action. Arriving at the synthesis from various positions and therefore methodologies of working, artists asked not whether art should be political, but how art should represent a/the political attitude, leading artists to focus on semiotic questions and to analyse the function of tropes. Such analysis drove the work of Charles Gaines from an abstracting systems-based practice to an investigation of the appearance of the political referent. Gaines’s method epitomises the claims this book advances about conceptualism, identity politics, and artmaking, as his work takes identity not solely as the property of the artist’s subject position, but as an element in a social field that can be referenced in a variety of ways. His career trajectory echoes the thrust of the movement from the analytic to the synthetic. Synthetic proposition artists resolved their historical objectification, when they became the subjects and not the objects in their work, as Fraser has identified about Mary Kelly’s Post Partum Document: “With objects and texts, Kelly poses the question of how women can represent themselves as the subjects, rather than the objects of desire.”6 Artists did so from a universalising standpoint, refusing anthropological definitions of identity and insisting on

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the applicability of minority, gender, or sexual specificity to abstract modes of thinking and working. Charles Gaines: gridding the political referent

The entire career of Charles Gaines has been dedicated to resisting or attempting to circumvent subjectivity. The political referent emerged in his work not as a means to represent himself or his political persuasion, but as a way to examine the relation of the poetic syntax of visual language to subject matter. A staunch conceptualist, Gaines has been creating artworks from rule-based processes since the early 1970s in order to question the operation of representation and modes of reference.7 By the 1990s he began analysing the specificity of tropes, focusing on the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, and eventually moving to work with particular political referents in a decisively non-descriptive, non-narrative, manner. In his early works Gaines set up a conceptual system from which the appearance of the work would be derived. Often employing chance operation or other aleatoric means to generate form, the work’s aesthetic was determined by systems, highlighting not only the distinction between the meaning of the terms random and arbitrary but also the distinction of the algorithmic from them both. Influenced by John Cage’s chance-based process, Tantric Buddhist drawing, the new modes of approaching art’s history advanced by Henri Focillon and George Kubler, as well as the artwork of Hanne Darboven, Adrian Piper, and Sol LeWitt, Gaines created a series of works that took the grid as its basic armature.8 In the series Regression (1973–74), comprised of four groups, each of seven drawings, Gaines used arithmetic formulas to form shapes within hand-drawn grids. Applying a code to generate the pattern, he drew numbers into the sequenced sets of squares, the variation of the next drawing emerging from the first. To represent both the object and the system that made the object was to demystify the process of the artwork’s making. Parts of the system were determined by the logic of the work itself, and some were arbitrary, which nevertheless did not make them random.9 Although considered as synonyms, random is a noun describing: “a haphazard course.” Arbitrary, on the other hand, is an adjective that according to Merriam-Webster is something: “not planned or chosen for a particular reason.”10 In mathematics random is a type of probability distribution while arbitrary references any and all that are possible. Random describes unpredictable outcomes or the fact that all outcomes are equally probable; while arbitrary involves individual judgement, as opposed to objective distinction. Human action can only be arbitrary. It in effect cannot be random, since random is as far from arbitrary as the abstract is from the concrete. In this regard, it is highly unlikely that any of Gaines’s choices or systems are random, as they always derive from a given

Charles Gaines by way of conclusion

set of processes and procedures based in or on human action and some form of deliberation; they are always determined by a set of factors, even if those are merely made specific by time, place, or availability of a vocabulary. Furthermore, as a whole, the systems applied by Gaines in his work are most likely not arbitrary either, but algorithmic. Indeed, an algorithmic system—a contained step-by-step formula applied to an end—can employ within it a randomised operation (for example throwing dice), or can be designed to yield a random outcome (as the mechanism that creates snow on a screen generates a random distribution), but by definition and description the systems applied by Gaines to generate work are algorithmic. As such they subvert the relation between human intention and the outcome. The question that remains is can an algorithmic system detach artistic subjectivity from its resultant aesthetic, and if so to what end. Historically, the logic at the heart of expressive art linked artistic gesture (and the act of composing) to the essence of the artist, as if the sum total of an artist’s choices rendered the latter’s subjectivity. The attempt by Conceptual artists to eliminate subjectivity from artmaking was meant to demystify it. Full objectivity or the extraction of subjectivity from any activity turned out to be humanly impossible, as has since become obvious in all other fields, including science. Subjective or not, aesthetic choices that activated political referents did not necessarily describe politics as subject matter in a narrative form, nor did they necessarily aestheticise the politics of their object. The argument at the heart of this book is that since neither the subject nor identity has retained their enlightenment-based definitions, our understanding of subjectivity is radically different than that of the individual artist/genius figure, the latter being a central notion in the definition of art as a tool of self-expression. The philosophical developments that altered the meaning of the subjective have also problematised our current understanding of the idea of objectivity. That the artistic choices made by Gaines (here as a model for all other Conceptual artists) were cerebral did not necessarily make them objective, or the opposite of subjective. Poststructuralism has offered us modes of understanding subjectivity and identity in ways that did not connote individuality or “the self,” as opposed to the humanistic models that had been reliant on notions of interiority and expressivity. Instead, subjectivity has come to be understood as a negotiation between the individual and the world, the formation of selfhood as a process reliant upon a matrix of visual and aural languages, operating on conscious and unconscious levels. Identity, the conscious “interface” between subjects on an individual and social scale, has therefore come to be seen as the on-going negotiation with the socio-economic condition of reality. What this means for the work of art, as the practice of Gaines has demonstrated time and again, is that the political referent can return in

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a non-descriptive way, or as a way to render the underlying structure of description itself. By the mid-1970s Gaines began employing photography, adding images to his systems. In Faces (1978–79) he took government-style headshots of people and then plotted their likenesses in a series containing three parts for each person. The first was the photograph. In the second, Gaines applied a system to translate the image into numbers and plotted them on a grid to fill the background, thus leaving an outline of the face to emerge as negative space. The third image was an accumulation of all previous faces, each mapped by a different color as the entire series progressed. Years later, Gaines explained: “Working with the figure made the meaning of the image more expansive, introducing culture, race, gender and so forth—issues that were not gridable.”11 Despite it being “ungridable” Gaines nevertheless continued to apply algorithmic systems to his/the subject matter, pointing to issues he would later interpret by analysing the grammatical function of metonymic relations. Approaching language as a matter of cultural negotiation, his work focused on how we come to understand the world either through metaphoric assimilations or metonymic proximities.12 As Gaines clarified: “What we experience in the world is less a matter of some truth of the object, but a matter of how we construct these objects and things to form meanings.”13 Derived from the Greek “metaphora,” meaning “to transport,” the metaphor is a trope that substitutes one object with another, surrogating meaning, as can be seen in the quip: “Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes.”14 Here the speaker had substituted art with mirror or hammer to make his point. Gaines emphasised that metaphoric relations do not rely on concrete connection, as opposed to metonymy, a trope based on specific relations such as cause and effect or proximity, with the latter offering the formal definition of metonymy as a structural component of syntax. Gaines employed metonymy as a tool of analysis extended from thinking about the function and uses of its motivated connections. His point in tending towards metonymy was that it is not legitimated by artistic subjectivity. His critique of metaphor was posed as a way to question the universalising and totalising tendencies of a liberal Western heritage, where metaphor was historically a primary trope. In his writing on the topic, Gaines performed a brilliant analysis demonstrating how the artist Santiago Sierra uses allegory, by definition an extended metaphor, to wash his hands from the extreme exploitation enacted by his art.15 As this book has shown, universalising and totalising analyses can be applied with recourse to the specific and the particular, and vice versa. By way of cognitive linguistics, Gaines defined the operation of metaphor as functioning through formal redundancies and unmotivated connections, a forced relationship between unrelated things meant to evoke emotion and undermine critical thinking. The danger of metaphor was its

Charles Gaines by way of conclusion

ability to produce illogical connections and thus to perpetuate stereotypes, as, for example, when it was aimed at demeaning people by equating them to animals or objects. For Gaines, the emotive power of the metaphor obfuscates the social and cultural location of the trope, allowing for easy manipulation and thwarting critical reflection. In an email exchange with Gaines, writer and professor Leslie Dick, following the work of the linguist Roman Jakobson, posited that it is impossible to separate the function of the two tropes, as both are necessary to hold meaning together. Jakobson had shown how speaking subjects and literary genres tended to favor either metaphor or metonymy, arguing most notably that Romanticism and Symbolism relied more on metaphor while Realism, for example, tended to use metonymic tropes. Jakobson’s theory was informed by his study of a variety of speech disorders characterised by the inability of the patient to combine metaphor and metonymy in the construction of meaning. It is interesting to underscore in this context that, in Jakobson’s formulation, it is actually the metaphor that is most responsible for metalanguage.16 The association of stylistic preference with genre can partly explain how and why different aesthetic inclinations have come to be associated with respective political tendencies. This was, as this book has shown, evident in the case of identity politics, the invocation of which was often enough for critics to determine it to be a literal mode of referencing politics. Resisting this impulse, Dick underscored that, although poetry relies heavily on metaphor, it is nevertheless a form of discourse that aims to foreground the materiality of the signifier. “Great poetry connects that materiality to the topic addressed in the content of the poem, and there may be an emotional effect associated with that connection. But the discursive structure that produces the poem is not itself emotional.”17 For Dick, meaning is not inherent to the structure, but rather a function of interpretation that we should endlessly perform, as she put it, “in a state of passionate detachment.”18 Focusing on metonymy was a way for Gaines to set up a system of referencing politics without description, and identity without subjectivity. As he explained: “classical literary theory treats the metonymy as a type of metaphor and bases the idea that they are inseparable on that. Coming from cognitive linguistics, I separate them because they are in fact separable cognitively, although they are not separable in the use of language … The metaphor has traditionally been defined as the trope connected to our subjectivity and responsible for the articulation or the location of discrete identity.”19 Gaines nevertheless connected the cognitive separation of the tropes, a mode of abstracting, back to the referent, but without compromising its universal potential. Yet, the idea of “passionate detachment” and the conviction that no reference trope is inherently critical, nevertheless seem to provide a fitting perspective

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to approach Manifestos (2008) where Gaines brought in a political referent by way of metonymy (Figures 6.1, 6.2). Four landmark political manifestos: Socialist International Congress’ Third Conference/Zimmerwald Manifesto (1917); the Situationist International’s Perspectives for Conscious Changes in Everyday Life (1961); the Black Panther Party’s Ten Point Program (1966); and the Zapatista Army of National Liberty’s Declaration of War (1993); were processed into a suite of drawings, videos, and music through coded translation. Applying a set of rules he devised, Gaines first collaged the entire manifesto onto hand-drawn 40 × 30 in. music working sheets, double staffed for piano, substituting the first letter of every word with its corresponding musical note (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, with H used for B-flat, as in the early Baroque tradition), treating letters without equivalent notes as a silent musical rest.20 The result was a series of music and chord notations on what he termed “working drawings.” Those were then transposed onto standard music sheets, written for the piano to obtain a consistent four beats per measure. The composer Sean Griffin arranged the music for a quintet titled Manifestos (2008). Considered one work, the total installation featured large-scale drawings at around 70 × 45 in., where both the scores and the manifestos were rendered. Varying slightly in size, the final drawings were installed in a room with a suite of four monitors, each featuring a scrolling text of one of the corresponding manifestos, with the bank of monitors flanked by speakers sounding the entire composition played in syncopation. Since out of twenty-six alphabet letters only eight correspond to musical notes, and Gaines’s translation dictated

6.1 

Charles Gaines, Manifestos, 2008. Multimedia, installation view. Courtesy of the artist. Credit: Brian Forrest / UCLA Hammer Museum.

Charles Gaines, Manifestos: Black Panther, (1966), 2008. Graphite on paper 62.5 × 45 in. Courtesy of the artist. Credit: Brian Forrest / UCLA Hammer Museum.

6.2 

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that letters without a corresponding note would appear silent, the result was a very slow-paced piece of music. Standing across from the monitors, the viewer was given ample time, not only in order to contemplate the content of the declarations, but also to simultaneously glance at the manifestos running parallel and, in this way, encourage a thematic comparison. Translated into music not from their original language, but rather from English, a certain uniformity was already imposed on the composition, as the frequency of letters, like the “a” in “and”, were bound to yield a particular cadence. Surely not random, perhaps arbitrary, and in any case echoing logic derived from that of textual syntax, the manifestos endowed the music with consistency that inevitably served to underscore their association with one another. In some ways, this mode of translation echoes numerological systems of interpretation, seen for example in Kabbalah, where numbers corresponding to letters are tallied to a numerical value for a word, then considered equivalent or interchangeable with another bearing the same value. Of course, a comparison of words based on their numerical value is irrational. It echoes the mystical quest to find patterns within texts as proof of divine intervention. However, although indeed influenced by Tantric drawing, Gaines did not seek a deific relationship with his translation system. It was quite the contrary, a way to empty thematic connections of the tie between the poetic gesture and the political referent. The attempt to link pattern to divinity is itself arbitrary, a metaphoric connection imposed on a metonymic system. Rather than reveal a divine truth, it points to the fact that in abstraction all sorts of connections can be made. In contrast, metonymy, as a trope, cannot function independently, but is rather always bound to particular proximity. What can however occur is that its entirety be assimilated under metaphoric interpretation. What Gaines’s rules could nevertheless aim for was thematic neutrality, where submitting such highly motivated objects as manifestos to a process reveals their systematic underpinning. The specific manifestos Gaines used were all emancipatory texts that described in clear and precise terms how subjugation serves the agenda of capitalism, demanding basic freedom and rights. The Panther and Zapatista manifestos highlighted the ways capitalist powers have mobilised racism as a tool of systematic oppression, and how a community consolidated by ethnic and geographic parameters can in return activate identity to consolidate struggle for rights and resources. Their presentation was an invitation to the viewer/reader/listener to map their own moral or ethical coordinates in relation to each and every one of the texts as both political and aesthetic objects. The content of the manifestos stands in stark contrast to the ostensible neutrality of the translation system. When asked by an audience member at a talk if he would ever use a right-wing manifesto, Gaines quickly replied

Charles Gaines by way of conclusion

that he would not.21 Evidently, the content—the political referent—matters, the point becoming the intervention into the mode of presentation. This particular set of manifestos mark the established association of a historical avant-garde, and contemporary critical practice, with egalitarian positions aimed at equality, and not, as a right-wing manifesto would have it, with exclusion or aggressive notions of survival of the fittest. Scrolling down the four screens, the manifestos are self-identical. As political texts they are what they are—content referring to their original capacity. However, as works of art they are something other than themselves, a fact emphasised by their appearance through another mode of intelligibility, namely music. As documents turned into objects, ideas turned into things, the process of translation may seem to be aestheticising politics, now decorated by the music.22 But the music in Manifestos does not merely serve as soundtrack, there to seduce an audience to linger and read. It highlights instead the distinction between looking and reading, reminding the viewer that reading is not inherently a critical activity, and manifestos by definition are not necessarily critical texts, but are rather emotive calls aimed to solicit following. The critical gap afforded by Gaines’s presentation of the manifestos was the loss of intelligibility between reading words and listening to another system they have generated, emptying them in the process of their capacity to communicate ideas. The distance necessary for interpretation—the difference between an art viewer and a manifesto follower—is also the gap formed by privilege and leisure. This is not presented as a qualitative gap, judging one against the other, but as a way to draw an analogy between rational thought and senseperception, a way to talk about a gap between experience and ideas, as Gaines has consistently explained in the presentations I cite. For him, the ways in which objects are categorised and how it is that they appear are never equal. His interest lies not in defining the world, but in showing the fissures, revealing how our understanding of the world is culturally produced, how the building blocks of form and meaning are structured, imbricated. These are tools not only to critically address phenomena as racism, homophobia, and misogyny, but to unpack the nuances where those appear inside our language, or within the function of tropes. Instead of pontificating, the work moves content from one form into another. The algorithmic tool by which the ungridable subject matter of Manifestos was made manifest also pointed to the systematic nature of political oppression. As manifestos they are specific, but as “aestheticised” objects, they form a metonymic syntax, where through their juxtaposition a correlation is derived. An equivalence of oppression appears across the various identities represented by the monitors. With the drawings, Gaines showed the system of meaning right next to how meaning has been produced. Demonstrating how the aesthetic has been derived, its myth is presented as such. The unity of the

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system and the outcomes, their synthesis, displays the way meaning is created and how its interpretation comes to be. Manifestos are identity-producing texts—they elicit the identification of the community towards which they are aimed, consolidating group action around them. But as they now appear, visually and aurally, they produce not identification, but interpretation, showing us how at this point in history identity can be activated not only as a felt place, but also as a historical fact, a product of objective social conditions. Within this logic, marginalisation does not have to be activated as a position of victimisation, defined against a dominant entity and inadvertently serving to buttress the power of domination.23 It also need not appear through metaphoric association as organically connected to one typology of identity over another. Identity, in its historical connection to marginalisation, is rather a condition to be analysed and eradicated. It can form a basis for solidarity by metonymy, taking into account that living conditions and environment form the positions from which identities can speak. Prescriptions for correct political or aesthetic attitudes cannot be defined a priori. They require a balance between metaphoric identification and metonymic alliances to uphold a sense of language, just as the politics of identity form a perspective of understanding the de-facto function of the economy, and hopefully the direction by which to overthrow the latter’s power to determine identity. Notes 1 Charles Gaines, Letter to Carol and Sol LeWitt, January 6, 1989, reproduced in Naima Keith, ed., Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974–1989 (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2014), 156. 2 Malik Gaines, “City After Fifty Years’ Living: L.A.’s Differences in Relation,” Art Journal 71, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 88–105. Note: Malik Gaines is Charles Gaines’s son. 3 On the history and theory of anti-identitarian stances see my “Is Identity a Method? A Study of Queer Feminist Praxis,” in Sexual Differences and Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, eds. Amelia Jones and Erin Silver (Manchester University Press: 2015), 204–225. 4 On the marketing of Conceptual Art see Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 5 José Esteban Muñoz, “Performing Disidentity: Disidentification as a Practice of Freedom,” in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 161–180. 6 Andrea Fraser, “On the Post-Partum Document,” Afterimage 13, no. 6 (1986): 6–8. 7 Charles Gaines, “Five Will Get You Ten: Courtney J. Martin in Conversation with Charles Gaines,” in Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974–1989, ed. Keith, 33–38. 8 Gaines made his grid-based works while on faculty at Fresno State University (where the first Feminist Art Program opened in 1971). See Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974–1989, ed. Keith.

Charles Gaines by way of conclusion

9 The term has been used by Gaines and received unquestioned by most of the commentators on his work, a fact that does not necessarily undermine some very competent analysis. See Travis Diehl, “A/The//Grid/Work,” XTRA Contemporary Art Quarterly 17, no. 4 (Summer 2015), http://x-traonline.org/article/gridwork/. 10 Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition, 2003. 11 Charles Gaines as told to William S. Smith, “Ungriddable,” Art in America 102, no. 861 (September 2014): 61. 12 Charles Gaines, “Visiting Artist Lecture Series” (California State University Long Beach, CA, October 19, 2011). 13 Charles Gaines, “Artist Talk” (The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, February 2, 2011), https://vimeo.com/92309679. 14 Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (1924), ed. William Keach (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), 120. This quote is often misattributed to Bertolt Brecht. 15 Charles Gaines, “Reconsidering Metaphor/Metonymy: Art and the Suppression of Thought,” Art Lies 64 (2009): 48–57. 16 Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in Fundamentals of Language, eds. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle (Netherlands, The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1956). 17 Charles Gaines and Leslie Dick, “On Metaphor and Metonymy as Artistic Strategy,” in Why Theory: CalArts MFA Catalog 2009 (Valencia, CA: California Institute of the Arts, 2009), 30. 18 Gaines and Dick, “On Metaphor and Metonymy as Artistic Strategy,” 38. 19 Personal correspondence with the artist February 26, 2016. 20 For a detailed descriptions of the process see: Kent Fine Arts LLC, Press Release for Charles Gaines Manifestos, October 23, 2008 through December 23, 2013. www.kentfineart.net/exhibitions/charles-gaines. 21 Gaines’s Hammer Museum Talk. All subsequent references to Gaines’s ideas are based on this talk. 22 On the aesthetisisation of politics see Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” (1955) in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–252, and Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” (1934) in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. (New York: Schocken, 1986), 220–238. 23 This can be seen in Gaines’s curatorial work. See the Gaines, “The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism,” (1993), reprinted in Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art since 1970, ed. Valerie Cassell Oliver (Houston, TX: Contemporary Arts Museum, 2005).

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate an illustration. An “n” after a page number indicates the number of the note on that page.

0 to 9 19, 96–97 46 Three-Part Variations on 3 Different Kinds of Cubes exhibition 77, 80 “1968” (Mercer) 41–42 “1975” (Kosuth) 113, 119 Abstract Expressionism 72, 114, 116 academic discipline, art as 114–116 Acconci, Vito 19, 96, 112n71, 126 Adorno, Theodor 50, 151n6 African American activism of the 1960s 152n26 Black Panther Party 13, 26n43, 27, 30, 46, 54n16, 57n50 Combahee River Collective 35–36 protests by 28 agency 10–11, 17, 147, 169–170, 178 AIDS exhibition 160–161 algorithmic systems 232–233, 239–240 Alloway, Lawrence 130–131 Althusser, Louis 6–7, 11, 123–124, 137–140, 148, 163 analytic art see turn from Conceptual Art to conceptualism an inadequate history of conceptual art (Kolbowski) 149 Araeen, Rasheed 188n24 The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault) 58n54 Art & Language group Art-Language 106n7, 150n1 Atkinson of 87 attitude toward political art 3 in relation to Conceptual Art 27 Harrison in relation to 108n29 interest of 114

Ramsden at 122 Smith at 119 “Art After Philosophy” (Kosuth) 2, 3, 32, 104, 106n7 “Art and Sexual Politics” (Kelly) 132 Art and Value (Beech) 218 “Art Good, Market Evil? (Graw) 217 “Artist as Ethnographer” (Foster) 52 art market data on 228n92 Droit de suite 229n101 financialisation of 219–220 Fraser on 208–209, 226n60 historical aspects 195–196 object-based practices linked to 156 painting in 217 Working Artists and the Greater Economy 229n102 Art Sale-Event (Piper) 88 Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) 26n43, 28–29, 111n64, 120–123, 152n23, 199, 202, 212 Asher, Michael 131, 150, 153n43, 191n57 Aspen 69, 96 Ayer, A.J. 71, 118 Bakan, Abigail 39, 226n69 Balibar, Étienne 29, 148, 185–186 Barry, Robert 117–118 Barthes, Roland on culture and politics 20 “Death of the author” 153n37 on interdisciplinarity 108n20 “reading images” and 68–69 Silverman on 141 on theory 106n8 work as Text of 101, 102

Index Becker, Howard 203–204 Beech, Dave 218–219 binary opposition 162–163 black feminism 35–36, 37, 55n25 “Black Nationalism” (Davis) 30 The Black Panther Party 13, 26n43, 27, 30, 46, 54n16, 57n50 “Black Popular Culture” symposium 30 the body 98–101, 105, 216 The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (Rosler) 143–144, 145 Boy With Flag (Hammons) 43 Bradley, Tom 180, 182 Bryan-Wilson, Julia 120, 202–203, 213 Buchloh, Benjamin 32, 42, 75, 76, 80, 144, 193n80 Cahan, Susan 214–215 Carson, Juli 11, 133, 140–141, 158 Catalysis (Piper) 99–100, 101, 102–103 Chronophobia (Lee) 81 civil rights see rights movements Combahee River Collective 35–36 “Coming Together in Parts” (Sussman) 166 commodification of art 165, 217–218, 220 commodity fetishism 211, 215 Commonwealth (Hardt) 185 “Conceptual Art 1962–1969” (Buchloh) 75 Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects exhibition 127–128 Conceptual Art and conceptualism see turn from Conceptual Art to conceptualism A Conceptual Seriation Arrested at Four Points in Time (Piper) 82, 83–86 Concrete Infinity series (Piper) 6, 61–67, 91 contact zones 40, 49 Context #7 (Piper) 13–18, 125 Cornered (Piper) 94 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 37–38 Crimp, Douglas 191n68, 192n70 curatorial work 173–174 Damaged Goods exhibition 206 Davis, Angela 30, 50 “Death of the Author” (Barthes) 69 de Beauvoir, Simone 107n13 “The Decade Show” exhibition 161–162, 163–164 definitions of Conceptual Art and conceptualism 1–2, 27–28 Derrida, Jacques 162–163, 191n65, 192n73 Deutsche, Rosalyn 161, 199–200 “Difference” exhibition 157, 158, 194 disciplinary and interdisciplinary Conceptual Art 68–72

disciplinary Conceptual Art 1–2 “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary” (Sekula) 145 Documentation I (Kelly) 135–138 Drobnick, Jim 166–167 Duchamp, Marcel de Duve and 118 The Duchamp Effect 42, 45–46 genealogies 128–129 idea art of 13 influence of 31, 42–45, 102 influence on Piper 75 legacy of 134 LeWitt in relation to 3 relations with Piper 108n26 readymade 117, 126 With My Tongue in My Cheek 43–45 Duncan, Carol 201–202 Dwan Gallery 19, 77, 95, 111n56, 126 equaliberty 185–186 essentialism 53n10, 154n49, 163 Essentially Speaking (Fuss) 162 “The Fact of Blackness” (Fanon) 43–44 female fetishism 135–136 feminism and feminist art activism 121 analytic and cultural 205 attitudes toward 158 black feminism 35–36, 37, 55n25, 106n3 body art 216–217 as a catalyst 116 at Fresno State University 240n8 image-text based 12 impact of 119 influence of 25n40 influences of 61 Lewis on 5 Molesworth on 134 need for 215 Piper on 130–131 Post-Partum Document 11 practices 157 practitioners 21 representation in 144, 157 Rosler on 147 treatment of institutional critique 195 Women and Work 132 see also gender issues; Kelly, Mary film theory 154n45, 158–160 fine art 201–202 First Investigations series (Kosuth) 32, 117–118 Five Unrelated Time Pieces/Meat Into Meat (Piper) 82, 87, 99

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Index Floor Grid (Piper) 73–74 formalism 3, 4 Foster, Hal 40, 42, 52, 177, 187n10, 196 Foucault, Michel 6, 24n20, 45, 58n54, 128, 153n37 Found Loft Sculpture series (Piper) 75 The Fox 122, 150n1 Frankfurt School 22, 51, 151n6, 191n68, 215, 217 Frascina, Francis 4, 121–122, 202 Fraser, Andrea “Art-field” of 213 on art market 208–209, 226n60 institutional critique and 195, 197, 205 on Kelly 231–232 May I Help You? 207–208, 225n51 on the service model 224n44 significance of 21–22 see also Untitled (Fraser) “From Trivial Pursuit to the Art of the Deal” (Trippi) 162 Funk Lessons series (Piper) 48, 94, 128–129 Fuss, Diane 154n49, 162 Gaines, Charles 22, 230, 232–240 gender issues 132, 133, 136, 147, 162, 194–195 Genet, Jean 30, 127 Gitlin, Todd 25n28, 152n26 Golden, Thelma 166, 168, 169, 180 González, Jennifer 50, 52, 171 Graw, Isabelle 217, 228n87 Green, Renée 40, 47–52, 178 Greenberg, Clement 4, 31, 71, 73 grid work 232, 240n8 Haacke, Hans Duchamp linked to 204 institutional critique 194 MoMA-Poll 197–204, 223n19 Seurat’s Les Poseuses 194, 195 Shapolsky et al 202 significance of 21, 203 synthetic art of 204–205 use of systems theory 82 Hall, Stuart 41, 57n44, 169 Hammons, David 42–45, 44 Harlem on My Mind exhibition 28 Harrison, Charles 75, 76, 108n29 Harvey, David 23n3, 184, 187n3 A Heap of Language (Smithson) 91 “Here and Now for Bobby Seale” (Genet) 127 Hightower, John 201, 202 historical aspects of conceptualism 13, 17–19 History Group 132–133

House Beautiful (Rosler) 145, 147 Hypothesis series (Piper) 82–83, 98 Hypothetical? (Simpson) 180–183 identity and identification as agency 178 characteristics of 34 determinants of 163–164 the economy of 174–180 gender and 133 Jones on 10 in May I Help You? 208 multiculturalism and 19 as a site of agency 11 subjectivity in relation to 131–132 synthetic proposition and 12 identity politics at 1993 Whitney Biennial 21 analysis of 2 anti 230 approaches to 29–30 characteristics of 7 conceptualism and 17 critics of 12 current events linked to 166 The Decade Show 161–164 definitions of 52–53, 157 emergence of 4 feminist 147 gay 30 Gitlin on 25n28 historical aspects 35–41, 171 identity in relation to 8 impact on conceptualism 28 leftist critics of 8–9 Lewis on 1 Mercer on 41–42 need for 38 neoliberalism linked to 184 Newton on 27 origin and purpose of 157 in political art 115 vs. “politics of identity” 24n22 problems of 185–186 psychoanalytic aspects 10 synthesis of 231 Wallace on 166–167 see also feminism and feminist art; multiculturalism; political art Import/Export Funk Office (Green) 47–52, 178 Infinitely Divisible Floor Construction (Piper) 81 Inflated Plastic Dropcloth Floor Piece (Piper) 73, 74

Index Inflated Plastic Dropcloth Wall Piece (Piper) 73, 74 “Information” exhibition 13–18, 45–47, 197–204 Injustice Case (Hammons) 43, 44, 57n50 institutional critique criticisms of 195 establishment of 171–172 Fraser’s 172–174, 205, 209–221 gender as 194–195 of Haacke 197–204 origin of 196 propositions of 221–222 significance of 21–22 in Whitney Biennial 1993 168 “The Institution of Sexual Intercourse” (Atkinson) 195 interdisciplinary thinking 114–115, 116, 140–141 intersectionality 36, 37 Johns, Jasper 117–118 Jones, Amelia 10, 171, 216 Kant, Emmanuel 71, 107n14 Kelly, Mary Althusser compared to 137–140 “Art and Sexual Politics” 132 Conceptual Art of 12 on feminist art strategies 157 Foucault compared to 137 influences 10 Post-Partum Document 11, 134–141, 175, 215, 231–232; significance of 116 Smith conversation 119 on synthetic art 12, 133 as a teacher 154n45 Women and Work 131–132 Kolbowski, Silvia 27, 52–53, 149, 150, 158–160, 194 Kosuth, Joseph “1975” 113, 119 aesthetics of 95 analytic proposition of 104 “Art After Philosophy” 2, 32 attitude toward political art 114 attitude toward the analytic 118 attitude toward the synthetic 117 Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects 127–128 First Investigations 117–118 on form 4 influence of 151n6 on minimalism 109n36

Osborne in relation to 71 on Piper 106n7 propositions of 71 significance of 2–3, 151n10 on TCA 123 Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) 33 Kotz, Liz 87, 96, 105 Krauss, Rosalind Crimp and 192n68, 192n70 on deskilling of disciplines 192n74 on Duchamp 204 on the grid 109n33 on Hypothetical? 182 on LeWitt 80 “Sense and Sensibility” 116 “Welcome to the Cultural Revolution” 179 Kubler, George 91, 93, 111n51 labor and gender 132 labor, productive and unproductive 218–219 Lacan, Jacques 136, 157, 162, 170 language Dwan Gallery shows 19, 95, 111n56, 126 Gaines’s 234–235 Kotz on 87–88 Piper on 87 Piper’s use of 76, 94, 104–105, 110n47 textual and visual 11 in Whitney Biennial 170 leftist thought 8–9, 55n24, 114, 132 Let the Record Show … (ACT-UP) 161 LeWitt, Sol 3, 70, 72, 75–76, 77, 80, 108n28, 109n33 “The Liberating Quality of Avant-garde Art” (Schapiro) 4 Lippard, Lucy 119–120, 122 Live in Your Head exhibition 23n13 MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House 153n43, 225n51 Manifestos (Gaines) 236–240 Martinez, Daniel Joseph 21, 174–180, 191n57, 191nn57–58 Marxist thought Althusser on 123–124 as analytic 148 on capitalism 226n69 commodity fetishism 211 Foucault linked to 6 identity politics and 1, 10–11, 13 Lewis on 5 in Monumental Garage Sale 143 on multiculturalism 41 in “Property Line” 150 Smith on 37–38

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Index Marxist thought (cont.) on Untitled 215–216 Žižek 41 Mayer, Rosemary 98, 100 May I Help You? (Fraser) 207–208, 225n51 McCollum, Allan 208, 225n51 McHugh, Patrick 6–7 McShine, Kynaston 13, 47, 124, 126, 201 Meat Into Meat (Piper) 82, 87, 99 mediation 54n22, 69–70, 107n12, 140, 147, 148 Meltzer, Eve 11, 114, 203 Mercer, Kobena 41–42 metaphor 234, 235, 240 metonymy 234, 235, 236, 238 Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) 28, 120 minimalism 72–80, 81, 108n21, 108n29, 109n36, 117 Model Pleasure I-V-III 1982–1983 (Kolbowski) 158–160 modernism 4, 187n5 Molesworth, Helen 133–134 MoMA see Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) MoMA-Poll (Haacke) 197–204, 215 montage technique 207 Monumental Garage Sale (Rosler) 142–143 motherhood in art 136–137 multiculturalism 5–6, 39–41, 157, 184, 193n80 Museum Highlights (Fraser) 206–207 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) “Information” 13, 45–47, 124, 201 Meta-Monumental Garage Sale 142–143 MoMA-Poll 197–204 protests at 121–122 museums role in art market 220–221 AWC and 120–122 corporatisation of 225n58 data on 228n96 economic aspects 196 exclusionary practices 168, 171–172 influence on 225n48 public-private partnerships 229n97 see also names of specific museums and galleries The Mythic Being series (Piper) 34, 35, 101, 105 “The Mythology of Difference” (Wright) 179–180 neoliberalism 2, 23n3, 184–185, 187n3 “The New Cultural Politics of Difference” (West) 161, 167, 168 New Museum of Contemporary Art 158, 161–162, 189n29, 194, 202, 206

Newton, Huey P. 13, 27, 30–31, 37, 54n16 New York Art Strike 120 New York Cultural Center 127–128 Nine-Part Floating Square (Piper) 73, 108n25 Nineteen Concrete Space-Time-Infinity Pieces suite (Piper) 32–34, 87, 95, 110n45, 110n48 Noriega, Chon 39–40 October archive of 45 Crimp at 191n68 The Duchamp Effect 42 “How Do I Look?” 192n68 “The Identity in Question” 55n24 nature of 58n54 “The Politics of the Signifiers” 177–178 significance of 5 on Whitney Biennial 183–184, 193n80 “On Practice” (Ramsden) 113, 122 Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt) 186 Osborne, Peter 70–71, 72, 95, 107n14 Out of Order, Out of Sight (Piper) 106n5, 112n81 Out There (Ferguson) 161 Owens, Craig 25n40, 106n8, 156 paintings 118, 217 “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (LeWitt) 77 parole 178 Perreault, John 97, 100 philosophical to political synthetic art 117–124 philosophy as means of artmaking 70–71 photography 142–143, 144, 234 Piper, Adrian on Conceptual Art 106n4 development of 68–69 relations with Duchamp 108n26 early work 19–20, 32 Funk Lessons 48 grid work of 77 influence of 109n38, 110n47 relations with Kubler 111n51 use of language 76, 87, 94–95, 96–97, 104–105 relations with LeWitt 109n33 LeWitt and 108n28 from minimalism to conceptualism 72–80 notebooks 110n45 Osborne on 71–72 political art of 123–130 practice of 60 Rauschenberg compared to 20

Index reading 106n5 recognition of 45–47 significance of 72, 95, 104–105, 106n3, 116 space and time 87–98 subjectivity of 101–104 use of systems theory 82 use of time 80–87 on xenophobia 153n38 see also titles of specific works by Piper poetry 19, 87, 95–96, 235 political art Abstract Expressionism in relation to 116–117 approaches to 148 attitudes toward 3, 113–115 Context series 126–128 debates about 156–157 vs. fine art 201–202 graphic strategies 161 identity in 115 museums and 120–121 Piper’s 123–130 practice and praxis in 122–123 reception of 113–114 response to 165–166 Rosler’s 142–147 signification in 148 subjectivity and 131–132 see also feminism and feminist art; institutional critique; Whitney Biennial, 1993 Post-Partum Document series (Kelly) 11, 134–141, 215, 231–232 practice and praxis 147 “Property Line” (Asher) 150 psychoanalysis 133, 141, 157, 158–160, 162 “the public” 171–172 “public art” 161, 206 “pure” Conceptualism 72, 80, 106n7 queer theory 5, 160–161, 192n68 Ramsden, Mel 113, 115, 122, 147 Rauschenberg, Robert 20, 80 Regression (Gaines) 232 representation 144, 156, 157, 160–161 rights movements 30, 35–39, 41–53, 115, 152n26 Ringgold, Faith 121 Rockefeller family 198–200, 201, 202, 223n19, 223n22, 224n28 Rosler, Martha 116, 142–147 Ross, David 172, 176 Rowbotham, Sheila 10–11

Saturday Afternoon Show 112n72 Saussure, Ferdinand de 178 Schindler House 153n43, 225n51 Seale, Bobby 13, 43, 57n50 the self in Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece 66–67 formation of 233 Piper’s interest in 72 in Piper’s work 20, 34 the subject in relation to 153n43, 170 subjectivity in relation to 131 Semiotics of the Kitchen (Rosler) 147 “Sense and Sensibility” (Krauss) 116 Seriation #1: Lecture (Piper) 91, 94 Seurat’s Les Poseuses (Haacke) 194, 195 Sexed Universals in Contemporary Art (Florence) 8 The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (Kubler) 91, 93 Siegelaub, Seth 2–3, 227n80 Simpson, Lorna 21, 180–183 Sixteen Permutations of a Planar analysis of a Square (Piper) 77–80 sixties, legacies of 41–53 Skrebowski, Luke 81–82, 133 “Slippages” (Green) 40 Smithson, Robert 19, 91, 111n56 space, codification of 97–98 “Space, Time, Language, Form” (Piper) 87 space and time 87–98 Space Paintings or Constructions I series (Piper) 108n23 “Specific Objects” (Judd) 3 Spingarn Tapes (Piper) 103, 104 Steps (Stepping Off Place) (Acconci) 126 “The Straight Mind” (Wittig) 8 Street Works I and Street Works II (Piper) 111n63 Streetwork Streettracks I-II (Piper) 97–98 strong conceptualism 70, 71, 95–96 structuralism 11, 114 Studio Museum in Harlem 161–162 Study for Museum Tags (Martinez) 174–180 the subject 25n36, 153n40, 153n43, 157–160 subjectivity agency and 17, 170 defining 131–132 Gaines and 232, 233 gender and 133 on the institution 172–174 Piper on 131 Piper’s use of 20 in Post-Partum Document 136, 137 in the Whitney Biennial 169

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Index Subject to Display (González) 52 “Survey of Street Works Downtown” (Lippard) 120 Sussman, Elisabeth 165, 166, 167 Sutton, Gloria 47–49 Sympathy for the Devil (Godard) 46 synthetic art see turn from Conceptual Art to conceptualism systems theory 81–82, 94, 194, 200–201, 224n37

significance of 220–222 social relations in 214–215 Untitled (The time needed to read a line.) (Piper) 32 Untitled (“This piece stands in a ratio of 1:3”) (Piper) 88 Untitled Construction series (Piper) 72–73, 74–75 Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City (Piper) 99

“Taking Control” (Deitcher) 163 “Talking to Myself ” (Piper) 99, 100, 101 Taped Lecture on Seriation (given November 7, 1968) (Piper) 91–94 Ten Point Program (Newton and Seale) 13 Text of a Piece for Larry Weiner, 1/14/69 (Piper) 88–91 theoretical Conceptualism 123 theoretical praxis 147 “There’s No Place Like Home” (Fraser) 221 “Three Models of Art Production Systems” (Piper) 124 Three Untitled Projects (Piper) 97–98 Tran (Amputee) (Rosler) 146 Tucker, Marcia 158, 163, 187n5, 187n7, 202 turn from Conceptual Art to conceptualism from analytic to synthetic 31–35, 47, 116–117, 120, 147, 149–150 California Conceptual Art 108n29 evolution of 31–35, 105 historical aspects 13, 17–19 nature and purpose of 115, 119 related definitions 1–2, 27–28, 106n7 response to 114–115 strong conceptualism 70, 71–72 theoretical conceptualism 124 West-coast conceptualism 143

Vacation Getaway (Rosler) 146

“Uneasy Bedfellows” (Murray) 5 “Uneven Development” (Deutsche) 161 Untitled (”ENIL EHT.”) (Piper) 88 Untitled (Fraser) as body art 217 capitalism in relation to 212–213 as a commodity 215–216, 218–219 identification of the institution 172–174 photo of 209 production of 210, 226n67 public-private divide in 210–212

Wallace, Michele 30, 41, 121, 152n26, 166–167 Wallach, Alan 201–202 Wallis, Brian 187n5, 195, 206 Walton, John 203–204 Weiner, Hannah 112n72, 126 “Welcome to the Cultural Revolution” (Krauss) 179 West, Cornel 161, 167, 168 West-coast conceptualism 108n29, 143 “What’s White” (Golden) 168 whiteness 168, 169 Whitney Biennial 1993 analysis of 164–172 debate on 55n24 Fraser’s contribution 172–174 Green’s contribution 178 identity politics at 21 legacy of 186, 189n29 Martinez’s contribution 174–180 October on 183–184 response to 12, 189n30 significance of 157, 183–187 Simpson’s contribution 180–183 Whitney Museum of American Art 28, 120, 221, 229n102 With My Tongue in My Cheek (Duchamp) 43–45 “Woman’s Stake” (Doane) 154n45 Women and Work (Kelly) 131–132 women’s rights see feminism and feminist art Working Artists and the Greater Economy 229n102 Wright, Charles A., Jr. 179–180 Žižek, Slavoj 39, 41