CRITICAL FORMS:

THE WAKE OF CONCEPTUALISM

The paper I gave at Symposium 2000 was perhaps less on the subject of post object art in New Zealand as on the means by which it might be encountered some two to three decades later by a non-participant, and on the elusiveness of its actions and forms in the face of this encounter. It also suggested the importance of negotiating such encounters for current practices of art and criticism. In this sense then, my paper shifted from an exercise in art history to an exercise in the positioning of the art historian and criticimplicitly of course myself. I was pleased to find that aspects of these extremely speculative musings (the majority of my claims were and remain propositional and rhetorical in both form and intent) were first raised by others and rehearsed over and over again throughout the four day event issues of historical revisionism, of derivation, and of the discursivity of the material residue of post object art for example. Not enough time has yet lapsed between that event and this re-writing to enable me to completely revise my initial thoughts presented at Symposium 2000 in light of the discussions that took place there around these issues. That said, the text which follows here does respond a little and make some reference to aspects of those discussions.

At the time of its delivery I very much thought of this paper as a strange, unintentional mirror piece to the paper delivered two days previously by Wystan Curnow.[1] That paper, in part it seemed to me, grappled with the problems of forming a language of criticism appropriate to post object art from within its very sphere, and so looked in a very particular manner at the role of post object art in the development of both an art criticism and a critical art in New Zealand. My paper, in relation, crystallized in my own mind both as product (or descendent) of that project outlined by Curnow, but in contrast to be about the problems of writing of post object or, to use the more general term I favor giving the persistent materiality of much of the work in question, conceptual art from beyond or without its sphere. After all, I had no direct involvement in 1970s conceptualism or post object art in New Zealand whatsoever. As a young critic and art historian I was most directly a product of that particular brand of 1980s postmodern emphasis upon linguistic structures, contextuality and cognitive contingency that had become so rapidly embedded within the burgeoning art academies and bureaucracies throughout New Zealand, a so-called textual turn that meshed in unique manners with a new phase of cultural nationalism (or perhaps better regionalism), the effects of which I think are yet to be fully articulated within a critical history of contemporary art in New Zealand. Post object art barely rated a mention in my third year New Zealand Art History class of the late 1980s. If I were growing up in its wakea claim I made at Symposium 2000 and which I wish to maintain here I was doing so unwittingly.

Just a couple of years later when I was on a Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa traineeship at the then National Art Gallery of New Zealand Robert Leonard and colleagues were beginning work on what was to become the 1992 exhibition Headlands: Thinking Through New Zealand Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Its now a common enough criticism of Headlands that it all but excluded post object work from the 1970s. As Leonard himself recently stated:

Headlands stuck with a painting-centred or image-centred idea of art. It was really lazy of us: post object art was simply too hard basket. There were excuses: the work had never been collected; it was hard to access for shows; it often involved artists responding to particular situations or sites or opportunity, and it seemed contrived to incorporate it into a white cube group show context. But more important was the fact that it simply didn't fit into the kinds of curatorially-driven exhibitions being done, which were all about images, codes of representations: art as iconography plus style. These were shows that were made with physically and conceptually portable art. Post object art just didn't fit the register.[2]

On one hand Leonard has speculated that a 1980s concentration upon language, textuality and mediation may have been a reaction against both the material literalness of the post object work and its romantic and sometime earnest implications. But on the other, and this I find more pertinent, its also interesting to find some work from the 1970s post object scene that already anticipates developments in the 1980s.[3] Of even more importance here, however, is the question of why in the decade between Headlands and the present day 1970s post object art has come to be a subject of such critical interest and importance? Much has clearly changed in this period.

We might tie this in to the recent international art historical interest in conceptualism,[4] an interest which I would claim sits in very conscious relation to the overt deployment of the forms, ciphers and strategies of 1960s and early 1970s conceptual art by present day artists and which like this work has a more complex genesis than a simple reaction to the perceived shortcomings of textually determined 1980s postmodernism. Rather, I suggest that we think of this interest as part of a larger process of investigation into the state of the contemporary in art, not as a historical or period appellation but as a condition that emerges from the end of modernism (both absorbing yet expanding beyond the parameters of various models of postmodernism) and that we might now recognize as being first signaled within the crux of minimal and conceptual arta moment in late-1960s art practice which both instigated many of the characteristics of what we still think of as contemporary art, but perhaps most crucially (and this of course is one of those characteristics, probably the most important) simultaneously brought into question the very idea of art as formed through modernity and passed on into the present. I am thinking here in particular of the critical work of Arthur C. Danto but also that of Hans Belting, Peter Bürger or even Hal Foster,[5] in which the potentiality of an art (post mid- to late-1960s) that exists beyond the exhaustion of its own narrative of being, that is beyond its claim to historical presence, progression and significance in Dantos terms art after the end of art, or art after the history of art. But that's perhaps a discussion for another occasion. What's crucial here is that in thinking of the New Zealand situation through the broad tenets of such an approach we are encouraged to think first of 1970s practice as having established certain conditions of the contemporary in New Zealand art,[6] and second of thus needing to think not in terms of periodisation within the contemporary (that is of a separation of post object art of the 1970s from textual models of the 1980s and so on) but of, as Christina Barton so succinctly stated in her Symposium 2000 paper, an arc of development from the 1960s onwards of a critical art practice in New Zealand.[7] With this in mind then perhaps we can state that the substrata subject of Symposium 2000a presence implicit, latent or otherwise in New Zealand post object art of the 1970's was the very development of the contemporary in New Zealand art and criticism, and more specifically the question of how the contemporary in art and culture has been formed within (and against) the accumulation of history.[8] On this point let me turn to the paper which I did not present to the conference.

That earlier proposed paper was entitled, Working it OutOn Language and Action. My intention had been to look at the relation between the textual or linguistic that is rational/structural parameters proposed in the work of Jim Allen, Bruce Barber and Phil Dadson and actions occurring within and/or against them. This relation, I proposed, was central to the production of meaning within and by individual works. But furthermore, it was a relation I believed was at the core of works implicit moves towards definition of the conditions and languages of both contemporary art and criticism in New Zealand.

A couple of things particularly interested me here. First were the relationships between intuition and intellect, and between cognitive processes and pragmatic action that underpinned Allens own work most especially relationships in which each term actively inhabits the other. And second was the manner in which a rough schema that I began to propose regarding the work of these artists, and of others, mapped against other critical models being developed in art-historical work on conceptualism internationally. This schema, as I saw it a schema I have not yet developed enough to either claim with authority, revise or refute involved four broad characteristics that I had noted in much of the work of the early to mid 1970s in New Zealand. First, the delineation (within the work) of the parameters of that work, action or event parameters in terms of physical environment, of possible action, of linguistic or numerical coordinates, of permutations of relationships between set participants. Second, the posing of a proposition within the field formed by such parameters. Third, the testing of the proposition by concurrent pragmatic problem-solving deduction and intuitive exploration. Fourth, and this was crucial, not merely supplementary, a retrospective reflection on the part of all registers of participants upon all this. What specifically interested me here was the manner in which such actions or investigations contained within individual works might be construed as compression's of different but interlinked phases in the strategic investigations of conceptualism within an international sphere.[9] That is, could it be, I wished to ask, that from the very outset post object art in New Zealand exhibited a particular adaptation and concentration of intellectual moves initiated elsewhere? If so, did this awareness of an international frame feed into a conscious search for or construction of an avant-gardist tradition within New Zealand? Did it constitute a productive, even deliberate misapprehension of the international so indicative of a centre-periphery art-historical model? Or did it fully participate in an alteration of the terms and functions of old provincialist relations undertaken by the strategic internationalism of conceptualism,[10] and in so doing begin to mark out new local and regional frames for an art of intellectual and cultural activism, the legacies of which we are just beginning to fully address today?

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