Alex Alberro Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity Pdf

CONCEPTUAL ART HAS COME TO OCCUPY AN increasingly prominent position within the array of movements that sprang to life out of the ashes of formalist modernism. As both a synoptic moment in the evolution of avant-garde art and a symbol of its (ultimately unfulfilled) critical negativity, information technology seems to hold open the promise of the '60s in a qualitatively different way from other, closely related types of art. However, despite this emblematic significance, non only do the political pregnant and artistic legacy of Conceptual fine art remain uncertain, but its very notion is even so hotly contested. The art-historical job of recovery and reconstruction is thus accompanied here by a pressing need for disquisitional reflection on the effectivity of past works within the present. Bookish discourses on art are, on the whole, ill-equipped to meet this need, since information technology requires taking a position on the historical pregnant of the nowadays, which is an inherently political task.

Alexander Alberro's Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity makes a merits for the contemporaneity of Conceptual art not, as i might expect, on the ground of its ongoing critical potential but on the grounds of its wider symptomatic significance as an artistic enactment of the "deeper logic of informatization"—a term borrowed from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire to denote the latest mode of capitalist product. In this formulation, an advisory economy is i characterized by a high proportion of service industries in which jobs are "highly mobile and involve flexible skills" centered on "cognition, data bear on and communication." The conventional view of Conceptual art equally, at least in part, resistant to the commodity form of the art object is thus turned on its head: Conceptual art appears as the advanced precursor of a new historical form of commodification.

The means of this provocative reversal is a shift of focus, away from critical debates about what is to count every bit Conceptual art and what makes Conceptual art critical, onto the innovative exhibition, publicity, and distribution practices that were required in gild to establish art-world careers for a minor group of conceptually oriented artists between 1968 and 1970. Conceptual Fine art and the Politics of Publicity focuses exclusively on the activities of the "conceptual art dealer and entrepreneur" Seth Siegelaub in New York between 1964 and 1971. (Siegelaub'southward proper name really ought to be in the title.) It is an "investigation of the emergence of conceptual art through the lens of Siegelaub'south involvement"—which too means, via the piece of work of the four principal artists with whom Siegelaub was associated: Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, and Lawrence Weiner.

The bulk of the volume comprises chapters on works past these artists as promoted by Siegelaub, forth with a divide handling of the famous "Xerox Book" show of December 1968 (a book, publicized as an exhibition, in which seven artists were allocated twenty-five pages each to present their work in photocopied form, in order to minimize the significance of the visual aspect. Ironically, this turned out to be besides expensive on a big scale, in one case Xerox refused sponsorship, and the artists' photocopies were thus duplicated past a regular printing printing.) There are besides accounts of Siegelaub's early on and final promotional activities, charting his increasingly active collaboration in the product of piece of work, as he moved from "dealer" via "consultant" or "organizer of data" to "catalyst" for the artistic process itself. For if, every bit Siegelaub argued, Conceptual art is an art in which forms of information traditionally regarded as "secondary" to the work become the "primary data" of the work itself, there is no longer whatsoever necessary textile distinction between the work and its publicity. Publicity tin at present become function of the documentary materiality of the work itself. Finally, in line with Hardt and Negri's use of the concept of informatization, Alberro emphasizes the fact that Siegelaub'south "Creative person'south Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement" defends artists' interests wholly within the terms of the commodity class. (The understanding was a model contract for the sale of art that, among other things, gave artists a continuing financial interest in increases in the sumptuary value of their work. It was Siegelaub'southward main contribution to the activities generated by the Art Workers Coalition, which agitated to give artists greater control over the use of their work.)

This is in many ways a bold and suggestive volume. It also displays the strengths characteristic of the historical case study: empirical detail and close analysis. (The account of the generative significance of the April 1968 bear witness of work by Carl Andre, Barry, and Weiner organized by Siegelaub at Windham College, and the chapter on Huebler, for instance, are particularly useful.) Simply it courts the attendant dangers of misleading generalization and the reinforcement of received ideas. These dangers are exacerbated by the fact that Alberro'due south critical position is, mostly, simply (albeit somewhat ambivalently) stated equally a framework for the historical study, as if each might benefit from the mere proximity of the other, by a kind of textual osmosis, without the need for a sustained argumentative elaboration of ideas.

Alberro is well aware of the vast and contested field of "Conceptual fine art" excluded past his restriction of the telescopic of his study (he lists some of its main features at the start), simply he goes alee with his general claims nonetheless, as though acknowledgment of the limitation were somehow adequate compensation for its costs. Yet the primary lacuna is found not so much in the book'south empirical scope as in the lack of a theoretical assay that might bridge the gap between the particularity of its subject matter and the generality of its claims. As information technology is, acceptance of the Siegelaub/Kosuth understanding of "Conceptual fine art," combined with Alberro's reliance on Baudrillard's account of the "sign-value" of the commodity (quite dissimilar, incidentally, from Hardt and Negri'due south use of the idea of immaterial labor), prejudges most of the major critical bug in a manner that leaves several of Alberro's historical claims looking spurious. (Hardt and Negri emphasize changes in the course of value-producing labor, whereas Baudrillard switches the site of the product of value from the labor process to the sphere of circulation.) In this respect, the book retains the field of vision of the notoriously closed historical optic of its two main protagonists, Siegelaub and Kosuth.

Some examples. Outset, Alberro'due south idea that Conceptual art is "inherently contradictory" because information technology is inscribed within the article form that it strove to escape fails to distinguish information technology from a whole range of other forms of advanced art in the twentieth century. To do then, economic assay of the historical specificities of different kinds of art-commodity would be required. Reference to Baudrillard fails to provide such distinction since his is an business relationship of a phase in the evolution of commodities in general. Withal the fact that there is something dissimilar, and difficult, virtually the article condition of this kind of fine art is the presupposition of the whole analysis—otherwise Siegelaub would non have been needed, historically, to invent new distributive forms. Here, despite himself, Alberro falls into that dualism of art-as-commodity and art-equally-art that vitiates the attempt of most sociologies of fine art to do more than provide historical materials for criticism. If commodification is historically constitutive of the social form of artistic autonomy, and such autonomy is a condition of art'southward critical function, every bit Adorno argued, the bare fact of commodification alone volition not take us very far, analytically or politically.

Second, Alberro presents the development of a logic of instruction-functioning-documentation in Huebler's work during 1968 as historically novel—indeed, equally a "completion" of Smithson—in such a mode equally to require Siegelaub'south new forms of marketing. Equally a result, it is argued, "information technology was Siegelaub, rather than the artists, who most thoroughly explored the specific operation of the institutional and contextual parameters that cordon off the work of art." Still this logic was a staple of the practice of a group of artists later associated with Fluxus (notably George Brecht, Yoko Ono, and Robert Morris) equally early equally 1962. The novelty was in neither the logic of production, nor in the fact of distribution, but in Siegelaub'south pursuit of a specific art-market form. Fluxus set up various alternative, rather dissimilar, distributive mechanisms. (One can imagine a companion volume to Alberro's about George Maciunas rather than Siegelaub.) The economic form of Siegelaub's marketing was thus in no way compelled by the artistic form of the piece of work. Maciunas and Siegelaub stand for historical alternatives. It would have been more interesting to compare the ii than to present Siegelaub every bit the bearer of economical necessity. The argument from success is circular, as Walter Benjamin had reason to remind united states.

Third, the foreclosure of the horizon of possibility concerning alternative types of distribution derives from a highly restricted deployment of the concept of publicity. In accordance with Siegelaub'south exercise, Alberro treats publicity as a dimension of marketing; its egalitarian associations are bars to the "democracy" of the market. Hence the contradiction detected within Conceptual art's "pursuit of publicness." But this is a critically arbitrary brake in the face of the rich theoretical literature on public spheres highlighting the plurality of modes of publicity as cultural forms. The self-restricting graphic symbol of Alberro'due south discourse here marks an unresolved tension within it between art-historical and more strictly critical concerns. It is a scar of the academic sectionalisation of labor.

Finally, Alberro emphasizes the importance of Kosuth's 2d Investigation (showtime presented December 1968–January 1969) to the artist's conception of the independence of an art idea from its presentational class. The works were shown equally bearding advertisements in newspapers and periodicals. Alberro acknowledges Kosuth's "prompting" by Lee Lozano and Dan Graham, but at that place is no analysis of the latter's historically more than important before uses of the form; nor is there mention of related but different before uses of magazines by Mel Bochner and Robert Smithson. Bochner's part equally a teacher of Kosuth also goes unremarked. This might be unobjectionable if this were only a case study of the Siegelaub artists, but it becomes questionable given the generality of the claims made here. To take inquired further in this direction would have destabilized Kosuth and Siegelaub'south highly restricted notion of "Conceptual fine art."

None of these criticisms detract from the wealth of detail in Alberro's historical reconstructions. But they do highlight the overreaching—at best, underargued—character of the volume's cardinal claims. These claims have a politics of publicity of their own.

Peter Osborne is professor of modern European philosophy at Middlesex University and the author, almost recently, of Conceptual Fine art (Phaidon).

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Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003, 239 pages.

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Source: https://www.artforum.com/print/200302/alexander-alberro-s-conceptual-art-and-the-politics-of-publicity-4157

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