Philosophy and Conceptual Art

9780199285556.pdfPhilosophy and Conceptual Art
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CONTENTS
Part I: Conceptual Art as a Kind of Art 1
1. On Perceiving Conceptual Art 3
Peter Lamarque
Derek Matravers
Gregory Currie
4. Speaking Through Silence: Conceptual Art and Conversational Implicature 51
Robert Hopkins
5. The Aesthetic Value of Ideas 71
Elisabeth Schellekens
6. Kant After LeWitt: Towards an Aesthetics of Conceptual Art 92
Diarmuid Costello
vi / Contents
Part III: Conceptual Art, Knowledge and Understanding 117
7. Matter and Meaning in the Work of Art: Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs 119
Carolyn Wilde
8. Telling Pictures: The Place of Narrative in Late Modern ‘Visual Art’ 138
David Davies
Peter Goldie
Kathleen Stock
Part IV: Appreciating Conceptual Art 195
11. Artistic Character, Creativity, and the Appraisal of Conceptual Art 197
Matthew Kieran
Margaret A. Boden
Dominic McIver Lopes
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Jenny Holzer, Truisms, 1978–87. Digital image © 2007, The Museum of Modern Art/Scala, Florence/© ARS, NY and DACS, Landon 2007.
2. Michael Craig-Martin, An Oak Tree, 1973. © Tate 2007.
3. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. Photo by Alfred Stieglitz from the peri- odical ‘‘The Blind Man’’, Beatrice Wood. Philadelphia Museum of Art © Photo Scala, Florence, © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2007.
4. Bruce Nauman, One Hundred Live and Die, 1984. Neon tubing with clear glass tubing on metal monolith; 118 × 132 1
4 × 21 inches (299.7 × 335.9 × 53.3 cm). Collection Benesse Corporation, Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Kagawa Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2007.
5. Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2007. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/SCALA, Florence.
6. Art–Language, Index 01 (Art and Language, Index 001) (aka Kassel Index), 1972. By permission of the Lisson Gallery, London.
7. Robert Barry, Inert Gas Series: Argon, 1969. By permission of the artist. (From a measured volume to indefinite expansion on March 4, 1969 on a beach in Santa Monica, California, one litre of argon was returned to the atmosphere. Documentation: Catalogue page, diapositive, two colour photographs framed.) Collection Elisabeth & Gerhard Sohst in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany. Photo Bridgeman Art Library.
8. Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing No. 623, 1989. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2007.
9. Adrian Piper, Catalysis IV, 1970–1. By permission of the artist.
viii / List of Illustrations
10. Santiago Sierra, Space Closed by Corrugated Metal, 2002. By permission of the Lisson Gallery, London.
11. Walter De Maria: Vertical Earth Kilometer, 1977. Kassel, Germany. Photo by N.C. Tenwiggenhorn. © Dia Center for the Arts.
12. Keith Arnatt, Trouser-Word Piece, 1972–89. © Tate 2007.
Introduction
Philosophy and Conceptual Art
Art devoid of ideas is seldom good art. Ideas can wear many guises in an artistic context: they can be highly focused and convey one specific concern (such as the idea of the threat of domestic violence), or, alternatively, they can be quite indefinite (such as the idea of the wilderness of nature as evocative of the sub- lime). There are, in fact, many different kinds of ideas that can be conveyed by art, and so the claim that good art should involve ideas need not imply that only art which sets out to communicate specific thoughts is worthy of our attention.
However, there is one artistic movement which has claimed that art should invariably aim to engage its audience intellectually, and, moreover, that it need not do so aesthetically or emotionally. Art, on this view, should aim to be ‘of the mind’, not simply because it demands a primarily intellectual approach, but also because such artwork is best understood as an idea. The purpose of art, according to this movement, is analytic, and as such, art is in the business of creating and transmitting ideas. Artists are authors of meaning rather than skilled craftsmen, since it is the idea, and not the art object, that is at the heart of artistic experience.
With a plethora of bold claims such as these, the conceptual art movement placed itself firmly within a stream of controversy from its very outset.¹
¹ Although the first publication to use the expression ‘Conceptual Art’ appears in Sol LeWitt’s ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ (1967), Henry Flynt was already exploring the idea in his ‘Essay:
x / Introduction
And like other avant-garde movements before it, it not only welcomed but partly instigated the tumultuous debate that was to engulf much of the Western art world from the late 1960s onwards by posing questions such as ‘What kind of thing can qualify as art?’, ‘Must art be beautiful?’, and ‘What is the role of artists?’ Despite their considerable diversity, the multitude of manifestos, mission statements, projects, and discussions that emerged from this movement can all be said to share this one central tenet: in art, the ‘idea is king’.² In conceptual art, that is, the concepts or ideas constitute the artworks’ ‘material’.³
In the process of redefining art-making and art appreciation in terms of a primarily intellectual process, many artists working in the conceptual tradition have drawn, and continue to draw, on philosophical theories and debates. Frequent appeals are made to philosophers from both the Anglo- Saxon and Continental perspectives: Wittgenstein, Carnap, Austin, Kuhn, Barthes, Althusser, Benjamin, Foucault, Lacan, Saussure, and many others. Many conceptual artists even go further, claiming that conceptual art and philosophy are in much the same business, so that even if they approach their subject matter from different angles, there is considerable overlap in the questions explored by the two disciplines. One conceptual artist and writer, Joseph Kosuth, even heralds conceptual art as the eventual successor to philosophy. Philosophy thus seems to have served not only as an inspiration, but, at times, even as a source of authority and justification for the work performed by conceptual artists.
As a matter of fact, comparatively few analytic philosophers have returned this interest and sense of amity. Even philosophers working on issues connected with artistic and aesthetic experience rarely appeal to conceptual artworks when it comes to illustrating their claims or supporting their views. Whilst critical discussions of the philosophical issues raised by conceptual art certainly
Concept Art’, in La Monte Young and Jackson MacLow (eds.), An Anthology of Chance Operations (New York, 1963).
² Paul Wood, Conceptual Art, Movements in Modern Art (London: Tate Publishing, 2002), 33. ³ Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, ‘The Dematerialization of Art’, Art International, 12/2 (February
1968), 31–6. See, for example, Art & Language’s Index 01 made for the ‘Documenta’ exhibition in 1972;
Keith Arnatt’s Trouser-Word Piece (1972) and Joseph Kosuth’s ‘Art After Philosophy’ Studio International, 178 (October 1969), 134–7, all illustrated in this volume; and the work of Mel Bochner and Art & Language, especially Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin.
See Kosuth, ‘Art After Philosophy’.
Introduction / xi
have been given due attention by art critics and art theorists, such investigations are still to find their way into analytic philosophy in a similarly consistent and systematic fashion.
What is the explanation for this neglect? Is it justified, or is the neglect grounded in an unwillingness to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by conceptual art to the received wisdoms about the ontology, epistemology, perception, and appreciation of art? These are some of the questions that prompted this volume. Taking conceptual art on its own terms, the papers gathered here investigate, from a philosophical point of view, how the status of conceptual art as art challenges not only the more traditional concepts of art and the aesthetic, but also, the very way in which we philosophize about them. In so doing, they will hopefully persuade writers in philosophical aesthetics to entertain a less reserved, and perhaps even less sceptical, perspective both on conceptual art as a movement as well as on particular works of conceptual art.
What is Conceptual Art?
What criteria does an artwork have to meet for it to count as conceptual? Unsurprisingly, the question admits of no straightforward answer. Conceptual art does not employ one specific technique or art medium, nor can it be categorized according to one distinctive genre; as Lucy Lippard has famously argued, there seem to be as many definitions of conceptual art as there are conceptual artists. However, if the only claim central to conceptual art were to be that the ‘idea is king’, then there may simply not be enough to go on in assessing whether a particular piece is conceptual or not. We need to do better than just say that conceptual art is not definable.
On closer scrutiny, there seems to be a choice to be made between two main ways of approaching the question: one more historical and the other more philosophical or conceptual. According to the more historical approach, the term ‘conceptual art’ refers exclusively to the artistic movement that took place roughly between 1966 and 1972. From this perspective, only pieces produced during that period, with the occasional exception of some works
Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, 2nd. edn. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
xii / Introduction
steeped in that spirit, can rightly be called ‘conceptual’. Examples of such works include Christine Koslov’s Information No Theory (1970), On Kawara’s series Date Paintings (1966 onwards), and Art & Language’s Hostage XXIV (1989).
The second approach is less historical and more philosophical or conceptual. From this perspective, artworks such as Damian Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991),¹ Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917, see Illustration 3), and Gavin Turk’s Cave (1991),¹¹ qualify as ‘conceptual’ too, even though they were not part of the period of the conceptual art movement strictly speaking. We suggest that what holds these works together as, broadly speaking, works of conceptual art, is that they have certain important characteristics in common. Most of the papers in this volume adhere to this more inclusive understanding of conceptual art; from now on the capitalized ‘Conceptual Art’ will only be used to refer to the artistic movement that took place between 1966 and 1972. We would like to advance the following five characteristic features of conceptual art, with the caveat that, in doing so, we wish firmly to avoid advancing a conclusive definition as such.
1. Conceptual art aims to remove the traditional emphasis on sensory pleasure and beauty, replacing it with an emphasis on ideas and the view that the art object is to be ‘dematerialized’.
2. Conceptual art sets out to challenge the limits of the identity and definition of artworks and questions the role of agency in art-making.
3. Conceptual art seeks, often as a response to modernism, to revise the role of art and its critics so that art-making becomes a kind of art criticism, at times also promoting anti-consumerist and anti-establishment views.
Koslov’s work consists of a tape recorder which, when activated, plays a statement made by the artist.
This series comprises square canvases onto which the artist has, on a daily basis, printed the day’s date (e.g. ‘Jan. 15, 1966’).
In this piece Michael Baldwin, Charles Harrison and Mel Ramsden have superimposed a short text (black on white) onto a black and white photograph. The text reads as follows: ‘There might be a picture of a place where a certain confusion is systematically suppressed; a place where a minor pragmatic violence is sustained by a trivial mechanism of fear. It is a place where Humpty Dumpty has the power of small adjustments in his metier. It is a place of contrivance and factitiousness, an unimportant enemy of public safety. For some reason it is an important place of celebration and display. It is also a place where inundation is ruled out by protocol.’
¹ Hirst’s piece consists of a dead shark immersed in a transparent tank of formaldehyde. ¹¹ This work consists of a blue ceramic commemorative plaque carrying the inscription
‘Borough of Kensington Gavin Turk Sculptor Worked Here 1989–1991’.
Introduction / xiii
4. Conceptual art rejects traditional artistic media, particularly the so-called plastic arts, in favour of new media of production such as photography, film, events, bodies, mixed media, ready-mades, and more.
5. Conceptual art replaces illustrative representation by what some call ‘semantic representation’—semantic not only (not necessarily) in the sense of words appearing on or in the work of art itself, but in the sense of depending on meaning being conveyed through a text or supporting discourse.
Conceptual Art as a Kind of Art
The chapters in this collection, and the remaining sections of this Introduction, are divided into four broad themes: conceptual art as a kind of art; conceptual art and aesthetic value; conceptual art, knowledge, and understanding; and appreciating conceptual art.
The first broad theme concerns what kind of art conceptual art is, and in what sense something can qualify as art when one of its self-avowed aims is precisely to throw into question the very idea of defining art. One question here, explored by Peter Lamarque, is what distinguishes a work of conceptual art from its visually accessible ‘physical’ base, perhaps in the form displayed in a gallery. He addresses this question within the wider context of the way in which art in general can be non-perceptual, and how that relates to the way in which art in general can be non-aesthetic. How can we locate the ‘art-making’ feature of a work of art in our perceptual experience if the artwork is self-avowedly non-perceptual? Lamarque’s discussion first considers other non-visual art forms, such as literature and poetry, and the analogies that can be drawn with conceptual art. One of the things that such an examination of the literary arts establishes is that novels, for example, can be non-perceptual whilst being aesthetic. This indicates that the non-perceptual character of conceptual art need not originate from the denial that beauty and aesthetic value ought to be the goal of art-making. Lamarque suggests that a better way of isolating the identity conditions of conceptual artworks is to think in terms of experience rather than perception. He then presents us with his ‘Empiricist Principle’ which, in conjunction with the ‘Distinctness Principle’, has it that the difference between a work of conceptual art and its material base must be experiential (broadly conceived) rather than perceptual or visual. What such a
xiv / Introduction
view can support, according to Lamarque, is an understanding of conceptual art that makes sense of the primacy of ideas over perception not by eliminating the perceptual entirely, but by rendering it subservient to the conceptual.
A second question concerning what kind of art conceptual art is centres around whether conceptual art, and its claim to ‘dematerialize’ the art object, is best understood as art either by conceiving of it as a reaction against the art that preceded it (and thus as an attempt to bring the story of art forward), or as an effort to halt the continuation of art (and perhaps thereby art history as we know it). For Derek Matravers, this question is pressing because, if conceptual art is to be appreciated only as a response to what has gone before, then we are misguided in setting out to appreciate and assess works of conceptual art solely in terms of the perceptual experiences they may yield. Focusing on the modernism of the 1950s, Matravers outlines why he thinks that conceptual art aims to overcome the difficulties presented by modernist art (in particular painting). Moreover, in the light of the institutional theory that he himself has defended, Matravers presents an argument for the view that external contextual factors can contribute to the process of determining whether an object is a work of art or not. What all this indicates, he suggests, is that if our aim is to defend conceptual art as a kind of art, we should look at the socio-historical context in which it emerged, and at the manner in which conceptual artists seek to readjust certain unbalances in art making and art appreciation, rather than in terms of any experiences it may lead us to enjoy.
Following on from the two questions discussed by Lamarque and Matravers, Gregory Currie explores the role played by appearances in conceptual artworks as contrasted with other kinds of art, and what any such contrasts may indicate about the ontology of conceptual works. Currie adopts an inclusive approach to conceptual art, and examines pieces such as Bruce Nauman’s One Hundred Live and Die (see Illustration 4), a work which, whilst primarily concerned with the function of art and the artist, still somehow relies on its appearance. Currie argues against the claim that all of a work’s art-relevant properties are available through sight alone, and that, accordingly, it is wrong to suppose that works with the same appearance have the same art-relevant qualities. But this, Currie explains, need not be incompatible with the idea that works of art are things primarily to be looked at, which is what most conceptualist artists reject. Accepting that artworks are first and foremost things to be looked at whilst rejecting the idea that artworks should be accessed by sight alone suggests that the process of engagement with artworks is what Currie
Introduction / xv
refers to as a ‘visual engagement’. Included amongst the identity conditions for conceptual artworks are, Currie concludes, a work’s visible features.
In his contribution, Robert Hopkins examines the question of how concep- tual art distinguishes itself from other art in the context of the communicative means available to conceptual art. For Hopkins, what sets conceptual art apart from other art is not the way in which it typically does not rely on sense experience in order to be fully appreciated; after all, literary artworks are like this too. Instead of sense experience, it is more likely that the distinguishing factor lies in the manner in which execution in conceptual art is a rather ‘per- functory affair’, as LeWitt puts it. In conceptual art, Hopkins argues, the work’s artistic properties are fully…