Lucy Lippard desmaterialización del objeto

7/31/2019 Lucy Lippard desmaterializacin del objeto

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PREFACEBecause this is a book about widely differing phenomena within a time span, notabout a "movement," there is no precise reasonfor certain inclusions and exclusionsexcept personal prejudice and an idiosyncratic method of categorization that wouldmake Iitile senseon anyoneelse's grounds. I planned this book to expose the chaoticnetwork of ideas in the air, in America and abroad, between 1966 and 1971. Whilethese ideas are more or less concerned with what I once called a "demateria lization"of the art object, the form of the book intentionally reflects chaos rather thanimposing order. And since I first wrote on the subject in 1967, it has often beenpointed out to methat dematerialization is aninaccurate term, that a piece of paperora photograph is asmuch anobject, or as"material," asa ton of lead.Granted. But forlack of a better term I have continued to refer to a process of dematerialization, or adeemphasis on material aspects (uniqueness, permanence, decorative attractiveness)."Eccentric Abstraction," "Anti-Form," "Process Art," "Anti-Illusionism," or whatever, did come about partly as a reaction against the industrialized geometry andsheer bulk of much minimal art. Yet minimal art was itself anti-formalist in lisnonrelational approach, its insistence on a neutralization of "composition" and otherhierarchical distinctions. Sol leWiti's premise that the concept or idea was more'important than the visual results of the system that generated the object underminedformalism by insisting on a return to content. His exhaustive permutations reintroduced chance into a systematic art, an idea that he has successfully Investigatedin his serial drawings, which are executed directly on the wall according to veryspecific instructions that allow for infinite generalization, or variety. Other artists weremore concerned with allowing materials rather than systemsto determine the form oftheir work, reflected in the ubiquity of temporary "piles" of materials around 1968(done by, among others, Andre, Baxter, Beuys, Bollinger, Ferrer, Kaltenbach, Long,louw, Morris, Nauman, Oppenheim, Saret, Serra, Smithson). This premise was soon.applied to such ephemeral materials as time itself, space, nonvisual systems, situations, unrecorded experience, unspoken ideas, and so on.Such an approach to physical materials led directly to a similar treatment ofperception, behavior, and thought processesper se.Themostelfective method in thiscase has often been the accent or overlay of an art context, an art framework, orsimply an art awareness, that is, the imposition of a foreign pattern or substance onexisting situations or information (e.o., Barry, Dibbets, Huebler, Oppenheim, Smithson, Weiner, and others). The addition of accents rather than the delineation of anindependent form ledawayfrom marking the object into remarkingdirect experience.("Ephemeralization" is the term Buckminster Fuller uses for "the design SCience

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strategy of doing even more with even less per unit of energy, space, and time.")Fragmentation is more like direct communication than the traditionally unified approach in wh ich superfluous literary transitions are introduced. Criticism itself tendsto clog up these direct reactive processes with irrelevant information, while theterseness and the isolation of much of the art reproduced here forces mental jumps;these in turn facilitate a heightened alertness to sensorial or visual phenomena.I would like this book to reflect that gradual deemphasis of sculptural concerns, andas the book evolves, I have deliberately concentrated increasingly on textual andphotographic work. This is not to say,of course,that manyartists whose work greatlyinterests me have not continued to work in sculpture or painting, but simply that thephenomena examined in this book tend to avoid those solutions. The antiindividualistic bias of its form (no single artist's sequential development or contribution can be traced without the help of the index) will hopefully emphasize timing,variety, fragmentation, and interrelationships above all. In fact, I have included someof the work here because it illustrates connections to or even exploitation of other,stronger work, or repetition of ideas considered from very different viewpoints, or howfar certain ideas can be taken before they become exhausted or totally absurd. In anycase, I enjoy the prospect of forcing the reader to make up his or her own mind whenconfronted with such a curious mass of information.Proto-conceptual art in the guise of the Fluxus group's "concept art," the performance and body works of the Japanese Gutai group, Happenings, concrete poetry,most performances and street works, and even such impressively eccentric manifestations as RayJohnson's use of the postal system or Arakawa's exotically referentialcanvases have been omitted partly through spatial necessity and partly because,confused as the issuesare, they would be unmanageableif somesimilarity of estheticintention were not maintained. This is not a book about all dematerialized art and thepoint I want to make is phenomenological rather than historical. I am probably safe insaying, as I have of some exhibitions I have organized, that no one but me (and myeditors) will read the whole book through.Because Six Years is about ideas changing over a period of time, it seems only fairto SUbject myself to the same ack of hindsight about which the artists themselves hadreservations when I asked permission to use old work or old statements. Therefore,the following excerpts from a December, 1969, interview by Ursula Meyer with me,have not been revised according to WhatI think now, but stand asthings looked then.The Postface offers some contradictions. *LL: A lot of this business about object art and non-object art gets very confused.People use it like a value jUdgment. "It's still an object" or "he's finally got past theobject." It isn't really a matter of how much materiality a work has, but what the artistis doing with it.UM: But I think it is very obvious that concern with the object is the fundamentalissue of what has been going on the last few years.LL: Probably it's typical of the first half of the twentieth century. Ad Reinhardt'smaking black-square identical paintings in 1960 was by implication a very importantending point. Now I think things have opened up to where the business of going"beyond" anything is less important. The fragmentation is so obvious. There's morechance of peopie doing what they want and not having it measured against theGreenbergian standard of "advance", or anybody else's standards. . . . It's strange

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how Reinhardt relates to much of the new art, because these artists often make art outof unadulterated life situations and Reinhardt was so very determined that art shouldrelate to nothing but ar t Doug Huebler sees the connection between his work andReinhardt's in the way he imposes an art framework on life. In a broad sense, anyonetaking a photograph is geometricizing life. Most of the artists who are now called"conceptual" were doing "minimal" work in 1967-68. Weiner and Kosuth, maybeBarry and Huebler less so, are very much concerned with Art, with retaining aconsistency, or coherency. They work in a straight, defini te line and exclude far morethan they include, which is fundamentally a formal or structural point of view. Morrisand Baxter and Nauman come closer to a Dada-Surrealist viewpoint, an acoeptiveinstead of a rejective approach. There's alwaysbeen that kind of split It usedto be theold classical-romantic thing, but in the last couple of years those terms have becomepretty irrelevant, or confused. Barry, for instance, is a very classical and a veryromantic artist at the sametime. The break,and it'soften averysubtle one too, comesacceptance or rejection of the muitiplicity of non-art subject matter, or in thecase of Barry or Huebler or Weiner, who use non-art, immaterial situations, it's theimposition of a closed instead of an open system. Barry doesn't "claim" all psychicphenomena, as lain Baxter might; he selects his pieces very strictly even when hecan't know or name the phenomena, but can only impose conditions on them.(Fundamentally it's a matter of degree of acceptance.iUM: Do you think visual art may eventually function in a different context altogether?LL: Yes, but there's going to have to be an immense educational process to getpeople to even begin to look at things, to say nothing of look at things the way artistslook at things. . . . Some artists now think it's absurd to fill up their studios withobjects that won' t be sold, and are trying to get their art communicated as rapidly as itis made. They're thinking out ways to make art what they'd like it to be in spite of thedevouring speed syndrome it's made in. That speed has not only to be taken intoconsideration, but to be utilized.UM: What do you think about the way the art journals have been pertaining to thenew art?LL: For the most part they haven't pertained, or even entertained the idea that ideascan be art. They're just beginning to realize they're going to have to treat this new artseriously. Generally, though, the artists are so much more intelligent than the writerson the subject that the absence of critical comment hasn't been mourned . . . . If Timeand Newsweek were more accurate, they'd probably be better art magazines thanmost of the art magazines. The trouble is they hand out incorrect and oversimplifiedinformation. . . . If you respect the art, it becomes more important to transmit theinformation about it accurately than to jUdge it. Probably the best way of doing that isthrough the artists. Let the readers make their own distinc tions about the extent towhich the artist is slinging it. That way they have to look at his or her work too, andthey're getting first-hand rather than second-hand information.UM: Do you believe the impact of what is happening now-with conceptual art andwhat I call the other culture-that impact is going to hit the so-called art world, thegalleries, the museums? What changes do you envisage?LL: Unfortunate ly I don't think there are going to be many changes taking placeImmediately. I think the art world is probably going to be able to absorb conceptual artas another "movement" and not pay too much attention to i t The art establishment

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depends so greatly on objects which can be bought and sold that I don't expect it todo much about an art that is opposed to the prevailing systems, Whenever Hectareand start talking about the possibility of no art or non-art in the future, 1haveto admit Ithink I'm going to be able to tell who the artists are anyway, Maybe another culture, anew network will arise, Ir s already clear that there are very different ways of seeingthings and thinking about things within the art world even as it stands now, not asclear as the traditional New York "uptown" and "downtown" dichotomy, but it hassomething to do with that.One of the important things about the new dematerialized art is that it provides away of getting the power structure out of New York and spreading it around towherever an artist feels like being at the time, Much art now is transported by theartist, or In the artist himself, rather than by watered-down, belated circulatingexhibi tions or by existing information networks such as mail, books, telex, video,radio, etc, The artist is traveling a lot more, not to sightsee, but to get his work out.New York is the center because of the stimulus here, the bar and studio dialogue,Even if we get the art works out of New York, even if the objects do travel, they alonedon't often provide the stimulus that they do combined with the milieu. But when theartists travel, whether they're liked or disliked, people are exposed directly to the artand to the ideas behind it in a more realistic, informal situation, , , , Another idea thathas come up often recently that interests me very much is that of the artist working asan interruptive device, a jolt, in present societal systems.Art hasalwaysbeenthat, in away, but John Latham and his APG group in London, among others, are trying to dealwith it more directly,UM: There's a strange reawakening in Europe now,LL: It may be more fertile for new ideas and new ways of disseminating art than theUnited States, Certainly Canada is, Charles Harrison has pointed out that Paris andthe various European cities are in the position that New York was in around 1939.There is a gallery and museum structure, but it is so dull and irrelevant to new art thatthere's a feeling that it can be bypassed, that new things can be done, voids filled.Whereas in New York, the present gallery-money-power structure is so strong that it'sgoing to be very diffi cult to lind a viable alternative to it. The artists who are trying todo non-object art are introducing a drastic solution to the problem of artists beingbought and sold so easily, along with their art. Not, God knows. that the artists makingconventional objects want that any more than anyone else, but their work unfortunately lends itself more easily to capitalist marketing devices. The people who buy awork of art they can 't hang up or have in their garden are less interested inpossession, They are patrons rather than collectors. rnat's Why all this seems soinapplicable to museums, because museums are basically acquisitive.UM: That one word "idea" contradicts any sort of central establishment. You mighthave many idea centers that are made by living artists rather than one chauvinistic artenterprise,LL: Yes, I was politicized by a trip to Argentina in the fall of 1968, when I talked toartists who felt that it was immoral to make thei r art in the society that existed there. Itbecomes clear that today everything, even art, exists in a political situation. I don 'tmean that art itself hasto be seen in political terms or look political, but the wayartistshandle their art, where they make it, the chances they get to make it, how they aregoing to let it out. and to whom-irs all part of a life style and a political situation, It


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becomes a matter of artists' power, of artists achieving enough solidarity so theyaren't at the mercy of a society that doesn't understand what they are doing. I guessthat's where the other culture, or alternative information network, comes in-so wecan have a choice of ways to live without dropping out,

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTSMy particular thanks go to Roberta Berg Handler for her impressive (and unpaid) work on thebibliography; as well as to Renata Karlin and Vieri Tucci fo r translations, Poppy Johnson forphotographic research, Nancy Landau and Gerald Barrett for typIng and transcriptions, BrendaGilchrist for her sympathetic editorial help, Gilda Kuhlman for designing the book, Nora Conoverfo r a painstaking job of copy-edttlnq, Carl Andre for the index, and the following for support andInformation: Ursula Meyer, Germano Cetant, Seth Sieqelaub, Art& Project (Amsterdam), Konradand Erika Fischer. Ken Friedman, Lisa Bear, Willoughby Sharp, and Charlotte Townsend. Andespecially to all the artists represented here, who provided not only their work, bu t the impetus todothe bookin thefirst place.

AUTHOR'S NOTE, Six years, . . is basically a bibliography and ust of events, arranged chronologicalily. Each year begins with a list of the books published then and a few general events\lhl lt could not be listed under specific months. The book list is followed by a monthly,breakdown of periodicals, exhibitions. catalogues, and works included in these;. ,ymposia; articles, interviews, and works by individual artists (alphabetically); andeneral articles and events-usually in that order,AIl'factual information (bibliographical, chronological, and general) is in bold type;,II anthological material (excerpts, statements, art works, symposia) is in roman type;d all commentary by the editor is in italics,'The following abbreviations have been used throughout: CAVe-Centro de Arte ymmunlcacion: AP8-Art and Project Bulletin; Arts-Arts Magazine;NETCo.-N.E.

Ing Co.; NSCAD-Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; MOMA-Museum ofdarn Art; (Rep,)-reproduction.


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POSTFACE

Hopes that "conceptual art" would be able to avoid the general commercialization,the destructively "progressive" approach of modernism were for the most partunfounded. It seemed in 1969 (see Preface) that no one, not even a public greedy lornovelty, would actually pay money, or much of it, for a xerox sheet reterrlng to anevent past or never directly perceived, a group of photographs documentlng anephemeral situation or condition, a project fo r work never to be complettel, wordsspoken but not recorded; it seemedthat these artists would therefore be torclbly treedfrom the tyranny of a commodity status and market-orientation. Threeyearslllttr, themajor conceptualists are selling work for substantial sums here and. In Europe, theyare represented by (and still more unexpected-showing in) the world's mOlt preltlg

! ious galleries, Clearly, whatever minor revolutions in communloatlon havt betnachieved by the process of dematerializing the object (easilymailed work, oeta,lQ,gutland magazinepieces.primarily art that canbe shown inexpensivelyand unobt rilt lvtl yin infinite locations at one time), art and artist in a capitalist society remlin IlIlll lr"l.On the other hand, the esthetic contributions of an "idea art" havebetn lionllel.t.able. An informational, documentary idiom has provided a vehicle lo r art lel_thatwere encumbered andobscured byformal considerations. It hasbecomeobvlfi)1I1 thatthere is a place for an art which paraliels(rather than replacesor is s u o e t t < ! , S I ' ~ ~ ~ ' h e decorative object, or, perhaps still more important, sets up new crltlcal ' h". ,1which to view and vitalize itself (the function of the Art,Language gro,ugrowing number of adherents). Such a strategy, if it continues to dev.lohave a salutory effect on the way all art is examined and developed In .t'.Conceptual art has not, however, as yet broken down the real barr ler lart context and those external disciplines-social, scientific, and aClldiwhich it draws sustenance. While it has become feasibie for artiste t o ' m l ~ W l t h technical concepts in their own imaginations, rather than having to struQglilf withconstructive techniques beyond their capacities and their finanoial mn,H:t""l'llctions between mathematics and art, philosophy and art, literature and art, P . ~ ' " f " l l n d art, are still at a very primitive level. There are some exceptions, among thai ll' ilt rte lnworks by Haacke, Buren. Piper, the Rosario group, Huebler. But, for the moat plrt, theartists have been confined to art quarters, usually by choice. As yet th . '!behllvloralartists" have not held particularly rewarding dialogues with their psychologlll l counterparts, and we have had no feedback on the Art-Language group Irom th t linguisticphilosophers they emulate. "Art use" of elementary knowledge, already Ilocepted andexhausted, oversimplification, and unsophistication in regard to work accompllehedin other fields are obvious barriers to such interdisciplinary communication,

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JThe general ignorance of the visual arts, especially their theoretical bases, deplor able even in the so-called intellectual world; the artist's well-founded despair of everreaching the mythical "masses" with "advanced art"; the resulting ghetto mentalitypredominant in the narrow and incestuous art world itself, with its resentful relianceon a very small group of dealers, curators, critics, editors, and collectors who are alltoo frequently and often unknowingly bound by Invisible apron strings to the "realworld's" powerstructure-all of these factors may make it unlike ly that conceptual artwill be any better equipped to affect the world any differently than, or even as much as,its less ephemeral counterparts. Certainly, few of the artists are directly concernedwith this aspect of their art, nor can they be, since art that begins with other than aninternal, esthetic goal rarely produces anything more than illustration or polemic. Thefact remains that the mere survival of something still 'called Art in a world so intolerantof the useless and uningratiating indicates that there is some hope for the kind ofawareness of that world which is uniquely imposed by esthetic criteria, no matter howbizarre the "visu al" manifestations may initially appear to those unacquainted withthe art context.

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Lucy Lippard desmaterialización del objeto

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