Tourist Information

essay by GEORGE BAKER

Today we are witness to one of the great ironies - perhaps catastrophes - of recent art history. With the current return to the procedures and practices of the emergent conceptual art of the late-1960s, the egalitarian dimension of much of that work, its impulse to enact the "death" of the author in order to open up a space for new audiences and potential collective production, has resulted in its dialectical opposite: the ever more effective and ever more cynical triumph of the marketing strategies of the contemporary art world. This triumph takes many forms: Often stemming from the failure of initial conceptual practices to resist their own recuperation, (1) at times the "death of the author" only succeeded in producing an ever greater variety of cultural commodities; other times working all too well, certain practices remained anonymous, never truly entering the public consciousness, and have thus become available to artists today as so many gambits to be claimed as their own and reintroduced onto the cultural market place. Here, we could cite many examples of what I will call (after Hal Foster) "cynical" reiterations of past practices; one will have to suffice. Andrea Zittel has recently received much attention for an ongoing project involving the use of trailers as the form taken by her work: little if any attention, however, has been directed at the fact that this project, among its many historical references, directly takes up a trailer project enacted in the 1970s by Michael Asher. However, Zittel utterly deflates the critical potential of Asher's earlier project (which was a specific critique of sculpture's object form, its institutional contextualization, and its mode of audience address) and spectacularizes the latter's relative anonymity (the project becomes, in effect, Zittel's "signature," and this process of critical deflation and authorial spectacularization are typical of what I am terming cynical reiterations of conceptualism). Such cynical returns to the strategies of conceptual art raise the question of how to determine where critical returns are being staged in contemporary practice (and, of course, what I have just asserted does not deny the fact that all critical art reworks in some immanent manner the art of its recent past). (2) Various accounts have been proposed to narrate this return: increasingly, they locate the twin modes of "institutional critique" and "site-specificity" as two models of practice that have returned in the critical work of the present. While such narratives are useful, at this point they too run the risk of becoming mere marketing terms, indeed stylistic labels, that contain and in fact serve the recuperation of the very work that they would ultimately support. Can we improve upon such narratives? Perhaps attention to the return of certain paradigms of conceptual practice, as opposed to its morphology or themes, would allow us to be more specific about the cultural situation of contemporary production: On the level of artistic paradigms, are conceptual practices simply being reiterated, in a sense pastiched, or are these paradigms being investigated, critiqued, deepened and in the end transformed? This is a large project, to be sure, but I want to initiate it with the investigation of one specific paradigmatic transformation of conceptualism that has manifestly returned in recent years: the critique of the distribution form of the work of art.

The critique of art's distribution form may in fact be constitutive for those practices within the milieu of the 1960s that led to the emergence of what we now call "institutional critique." (3) One need only think back to Dan Graham's poem-object Schema, his magazine piece Homes for America, or similar projects by Daniel Buren, to realize how closely intertwined these two investigations in fact were. With Conceptual art's continuous shift from the modes of sculptural production characteristic of Minimalism to interventions increasingly delimited by the spaces of discourse, photography, or architecture, two problems inevitably arose and were addressed by the most self-aware of this generation of artists. First, the "dematerialization" of the art object into forms that were often not immaterial, but easily distributable, focused attention on the frames (institutional, media, or otherwise) in which that distribution occurred. Second, and perhaps more importantly, this distribution opened up what Benjamin Buchloh has called the "problematic of the contemporary publics:" To challenge authorial competence, to deskill the artistic act, to redefine the object status of the avant-garde work, all of these developments led to the potential that new audiences would ostensibly be addressed by the conceptual work of art. (4) Furthermore, in its best moments, such work would not simply address non-specialized audiences en masse, but would address them as a public, in potentially transformative ways, in a manner that would speak to the very conditions of history in the face of which the avant-garde work had too often fallen silent. Recently, such developments have led to the rather startling assertion by the art historian Thomas Crow that Conceptual art represents a break with modernism tout court, and in its ultimate aspirations reconnects with the artistic potential of the early pre-modernist academies. In Conceptual art's distrust of the purely visual, its dependence on the textual, its address to new audiences, and its potential to speak to historical experience, Crow sees something not unlike the social function served by history painting before the nineteenth century. For Crow, Conceptual art represents a break with the avant-garde, a rupture in the present that foregrounds a more fundamental continuity with the competencies and abilities of art of the now-distant past. For Conceptual art's other primary historian, Benjamin Buchloh, nothing could be further from the case: For Buchloh, Conceptual art represents a break within the avant-garde, a rupture that foregrounds a primary discontinuity with any past paradigms of artistic production through the paradoxical reconfiguration of the avant-garde legacy itself. (5) If in the end Buchloh, too, remains interested in the ability of Conceptual art to reach new publics and to make some claims to represent history, his narrative foregrounds the fact that the representation of history, normally connoting some access to totality or organicity of experience, in the end only emerges with Conceptual art in the utter and most extreme fragmentation of the avant-garde object itself. (6) From within this contradiction arises much of the most consequential work of the last thirty years.

*essay by* GEORGE BAKER
		Today we are witness to one of the great ironies - perhaps catastrophes - of recent art history. With the current return to the procedures and practices of the emergent conceptual art of the late-1960s, the egalitarian dimension of much of that work, its impulse to enact the "death" of the author in order to open up a space for new audiences and potential collective production, has resulted in its dialectical opposite: the ever more effective and ever more cynical triumph of the marketing strategies of the contemporary art world. This triumph takes many forms: Often stemming from the failure of initial conceptual practices to resist their own recuperation, (1) at times the "death of the author" only succeeded in producing an ever greater variety of cultural commodities; other times working all too well, certain practices remained anonymous, never truly entering the public consciousness, and have thus become available to artists today as so many gambits to be claimed as their own and reintroduced onto the cultural market place. Here, we could cite many examples of what I will call (after Hal Foster) "cynical" reiterations of past practices; one will have to suffice. Andrea Zittel has recently received much attention for an ongoing project involving the use of trailers as the form taken by her work: little if any attention, however, has been directed at the fact that this project, among its many historical references, directly takes up a trailer project enacted in the 1970s by Michael Asher. However, Zittel utterly deflates the critical potential of Asher's earlier project (which was a specific critique of sculpture's object form, its institutional contextualization, and its mode of audience address) and spectacularizes the latter's relative anonymity (the project becomes, in effect, Zittel's "signature," and this process of critical deflation and authorial spectacularization are typical of what I am terming cynical reiterations of conceptualism). Such cynical returns to the strategies of conceptual art raise the question of how to determine where critical returns are being staged in contemporary practice (and, of course, what I have just asserted does not deny the fact that all critical art reworks in some immanent manner the art of its recent past). (2) Various accounts have been proposed to narrate this return: increasingly, they locate the twin modes of "institutional critique" and "site-specificity" as two models of practice that have returned in the critical work of the present. While such narratives are useful, at this point they too run the risk of becoming mere marketing terms, indeed stylistic labels, that contain and in fact serve the recuperation of the very work that they would ultimately support. Can we improve upon such narratives? Perhaps attention to the return of certain paradigms of conceptual practice, as opposed to its morphology or themes, would allow us to be more specific about the cultural situation of contemporary production: On the level of artistic paradigms, are conceptual practices simply being reiterated, in a sense pastiched, or are these paradigms being investigated, critiqued, deepened and in the end transformed? This is a large project, to be sure, but I want to initiate it with the investigation of one specific paradigmatic transformation of conceptualism that has manifestly returned in recent years: the critique of the distribution form of the work of art. The critique of art's distribution form may in fact be constitutive for those practices within the milieu of the 1960s that led to the emergence of what we now call "institutional critique." (3) One need only think back to Dan Graham's poem-object Schema, his magazine piece Homes for America, or similar projects by Daniel Buren, to realize how closely intertwined these two investigations in fact were. With Conceptual art's continuous shift from the modes of sculptural production characteristic of Minimalism to interventions increasingly delimited by the spaces of discourse, photography, or architecture, two problems inevitably arose and were addressed by the most self-aware of this generation of artists. First, the "dematerialization" of the art object into forms that were often not immaterial, but easily distributable, focused attention on the frames (institutional, media, or otherwise) in which that distribution occurred. Second, and perhaps more importantly, this distribution opened up what Benjamin Buchloh has called the "problematic of the contemporary publics:" To challenge authorial competence, to deskill the artistic act, to redefine the object status of the avant-garde work, all of these developments led to the potential that new audiences would ostensibly be addressed by the conceptual work of art. (4) Furthermore, in its best moments, such work would not simply address non-specialized audiences en masse, but would address them as a public, in potentially transformative ways, in a manner that would speak to the very conditions of history in the face of which the avant-garde work had too often fallen silent. Recently, such developments have led to the rather startling assertion by the art historian Thomas Crow that Conceptual art represents a break with modernism tout court, and in its ultimate aspirations reconnects with the artistic potential of the early pre-modernist academies. In Conceptual art's distrust of the purely visual, its dependence on the textual, its address to new audiences, and its potential to speak to historical experience, Crow sees something not unlike the social function served by history painting before the nineteenth century. For Crow, Conceptual art represents a break with the avant-garde, a rupture in the present that foregrounds a more fundamental continuity with the competencies and abilities of art of the now-distant past. For Conceptual art's other primary historian, Benjamin Buchloh, nothing could be further from the case: For Buchloh, Conceptual art represents a break within the avant-garde, a rupture that foregrounds a primary discontinuity with any past paradigms of artistic production through the paradoxical reconfiguration of the avant-garde legacy itself. (5) If in the end Buchloh, too, remains interested in the ability of Conceptual art to reach new publics and to make some claims to represent history, his narrative foregrounds the fact that the representation of history, normally connoting some access to totality or organicity of experience, in the end only emerges with Conceptual art in the utter and most extreme fragmentation of the avant-garde object itself. (6) From within this contradiction arises much of the most consequential work of the last thirty years.