...continued
Blair French
In beginning to prepare this paper, however,
I became increasingly aware of a third term
or register which for some strange reason Id
almost unconsciously set aside the visual. This
began to bother me as outside of my work on
New Zealand conceptualism the visual or most
specifically the photographic image as discursive
arena of art, forms the key field of my present
work as a critic and art historian. There's
a whole rewriting of the relationship between
photography and conceptualism taking place internationally
at the moment rewriting in which each of those
terms is pressured by the other, or perhaps
more accurately the reflexive and social criticality
of each is figured within the gambit of the
other.
[11] Furthermore, this mode of analysis claims that
for something so apparently based on a critique
of the primacy of vision, or certainly at least
on examination of the assumptions of visions
valueless cognitive function, conceptualism
has left behind not just a wealth of visual
material, as if somehow this certifies certain
of its activities, but also a reinvestment in
the cultural capital of the visual. So I began
to expand the set of registers I wished to look
at, and began to think about them as my key
subject slightly aside from their specific manifestations
in particular works. And in fact I began to
concentrate upon a four-part relationlanguage,
action, materiality (for perhaps we should make
some distinction between action and materiality
in their differing relations to temporality),
and image in terms of something I termed as
the wake of conceptualism, eventually directing
my thoughts back to the work of Allen not in
order to focus on the historical record of his
work, which I detailed in my essay for the
Interventions
catalogue,
[12]
but rather upon some invocation of the felt
effect, those feathered shockwaves of conceptualism
that permeate and condition the contemporary.
My interest obviously lies with the very means
of my encounters with the art-historical material
of conceptualism. Its an oft-stated critical
fallacy, even today, that conceptual art involved
the elision of the object of the condition of
thing
nessfrom art. In this sense post
object art is itself a strange term unless we
think of post in the sense of not only subsequent
to the excluding hegemony of, but also dependent
upon and still partaking in. So let me assert,
as Terry Smith has, that conceptual art involved
the production of conceptual
objects,
[13] and of theoretical and transnationally strategic
objects and events or actions.
[14] Furthermore,
conceptualism involved the production also of
strategically discursive
images early
instances of what rapidly became a burgeoning
economy of information retrieval, enframing
(in the Heiddergerrian sense) and circulation.
Art might no longer have been dependent upon
object
ness, or upon visual representation,
but nowhere in the dispersed, discursive field
of so called post object art was the potentiality
of either object or image finally precluded.
That said, if traditional modes of art history
have always involved covert studies of the documentation
of art, as André Malraux so insisted,
then the art-historical study of post object
or conceptual art has made of its overt subject
the document, and furthermore the very idea
of document.
[15]
If conceptual art stands, as I suggested earlier,
at the foundation of a critically self-reflexive
notion of contemporary art, then present acts
of thinking and writing the history of conceptual
art must necessarily grapple with the pressure
this places on the methodologies of art history
and in particular the forced cohabitation of
the languages of history and criticism in a
state of self-doubt. It is not simply conceptualism's
location on the cusp of art history that matters
here, but its tangling of the terms of art,
history, knowledge, language and the like.
When I write that as a viewer and as a critic
my very consciousness has been formed in the
wake of conceptualism I am referring most particularly
to two forms of trail or backwash (putting aside
here the notion of contemporary art as enacting
a form of ongoing wake
for the passing
of conceptualism and the readings that may produce).
The first is the wake of material detritus;
the physical, visible, textual material collecting
in archives, under beds, in scrapbooks and such
places; the notes, the videotapes, the photographs,
the accounts all those things that make up the
documentation of conceptual art on one hand,
but also make up the very experience of a self-reflexive,
dispersed notion of art as a means of thinking,
acting, and communicating within the world.
And second, the conceptual or further epistemological
wake of conceptualism. The wake of the period
we are looking at here, the wake in which I
think as younger critics and artists myself
and my peers swim just as much if not more so
than that of the obsessive mediation of 1980s
postmodernism is the wake of a passage from
the disintegrating certitude's of modernism
through to the present, which is a passage from
art to non-art and back again. Its a passage
along polyvalent registers or, to rephrase that,
a passage along and simultaneous transformation
of the registers of the textual, the material,
the active or bodily and the visual. And I don't
necessarily mean that this condition is one
that we as post conceptual artists and critics
are or need be overtly aware of. Its the inheritance,
in a sense, of conditions, assumptions and conventions
of means of acting, viewing, communicating (of
making meaning)formed at the beginning of the
contemporary. And as with any inheritance, neither
its at times intangibility, nor its displacement
or refutation by those to whom it falls to,
nor indeed its apparent irrelevance to their
activities finally negates its existence.
This idea of passage that I am evoking is clearly
a means by which to elide the distinctive periodisations
of conceptualism/postmodernism/the present within
a broader purview of the contemporary. I'm not
interested in the idea of passage as the abandonment
of the terms, conditions and experiences of
one moment for another, or of the supercession
of a preceding term by its apparent successor.
My real interest here is in the manner in which
conceptualism is the productive, working manifestation
of a crisis of knowledge systems through which
those various terms that appear within the contemporary
take on certain forms, both retrospectively
and projectively. Any passage linking conceptualism
to the present then tends to drag along with
it an accumulation of conventions from formations
such as postmodernism, the effect of which is
to foreground the self-doubting tendency of
any new representational act. As I've already
intimated above, there's little doubt that the
recent art-historical re-fascination with conceptualism
parallels, is in part perhaps even sourced within
a perception of its foundational genealogy for
contemporary practices of the real, of the everyday,
of the gestural and ephemeral, in short of the
attempted, performed, perhaps faked or even
authentic re-collapsing of art into life enacted
in aspects of post object or conceptual art.
It has clearly then also been driven by a desire
to locate such actions within a verifiable intellectual
framework and thus resist claims made by conservative
critics either championing arts rejection at
last of its textual status, or obversely (and
yet these are almost one and the same position)
lambasting its formal insincerity. Either way,
I think that we can see in this how the structural
self-analysis of a particular mode of conceptualism
(which because of its very analytical basis
came in certain modes of postmodern analysis
to retrospectively stand in for conceptualism
in total), the almost evangelical embracing
of textual mediation of not only the visual
but the social and the psychological that characterized
a hegemonic form of postmodernism, and our more
recent re-submission to the seduction of visual
forms, spatial fields, the technologies of the
global age and the satisfaction of discrete,
everyday act show all these constitute not a
sequential narrative of art after modernism,
but rather the mutually dependent actions of
art in an age of arts self-awareness of its
own contingency. That four part relation of
action, material, language, and image is present
in each one of the terms is elided (and here
obviously I refute the so-called anti-aesthetic
of conceptualism, the banished materiality of
postmodernism or the hegemonic visuality of
the present day)each foregrounds the contingency
of the others, and so anticipates a certain
ambivalency in its own purchase upon the social
and imaginative world.
What then are the key conditions of, or questions
posed by the contemporary that I would claim
are first cogently and insistently proposed
by the initial structural-minimal-conceptual
nexus of the 1960s and 1970s
[16]conditions
and questions underpinning practice in through
the 1980s and early 1990s just as significantly
as today, if in more covert or elusive manners,
and yet written out of much of the critical
framing of that practice particularly within
the New Zealand context?
The first has to be that very condition of contingency
and ambivalence with regard to the categories
and/or functional actions of art that I have
already referred to. This is not the same as
an absolute relativity for it is partially formed
in the self-reflexivity of any singular action,
form, image or text as well as its relation
to the specific historical conditions to which,
to borrow from Jeff Wall, it responds and which,
in that sense, have brought it into being.
[17]
Borrowing further from Wall here in his introduction
to Dan Grahams book of selected texts,
Two-Way
Mirror Power, we might identify the second
and related condition as being the embracing
of a freedom to make a metonymic shift between
art and non-art and back again almost at will.
But here we have one caveatour third condition
the need for inbuilt explication. The new look
of non-art [as art], Wall writes, succeeded
in forcing new patterns of perception, but these
were not spontaneously available. Such works,
not being familiar, demanded a new social role
for commentary
[18] We shall come to instances of such commentary soon. The key
point here, resulting in effect from the intersection
of these three conditions (or their necessary
dependence upon each other) is perhaps the most
deeply felt legacy of conceptualism within present-day
practice: the incorporation of the function
of self-criticality of commentary, of self-reflexivity,
of foregrounded historical contingency and of
aesthetic ambivalency within the art work itself.
This is not to say that all works or acts of
art incorporate or enact these functions, but
it is to say that they all at the very least
contain the latent potential for such, or that
they cannot banish language completely from
their domain. On the other hand, of course,
when such functions overtake all other actions
or effects of art, entropy sets in. Our fourth
condition is that of the systematic form of
art within a communicational network or economy,
coexistent with arts concurrent capacity for
disruptive system intervention. Fifth, and most
closely related to that aforementioned dispersal
of the category of art into the infinite fields
of non-art (leading to their replacement of
or absorption by that first category) is the
aspiration towards (or at least the gesture
of) social intervention the desired intersection
of art and life in which each take purchase
upon and give some cogent meaning to the other.
And finally, our sixth condition here is the
condition of informationarts willing participation
in the proliferating communicational networks
which ensnare our social being and constantly
nudge our epistemological certitude's day by
day. This participation may be disruptive, or
it may be compliant. It may be at the level
of component exchanged within existing information
networks, but most significantly of all it may
seek to make of art itself another register
of information gathering and redistribution
and so further aspire towards that self-dematerialisation
impossibly promised within conceptualism.
What follows is a comparative discussion of
sorts that seeks to illustrate something of
this relation between post object or conceptual
art and present-day practice. But it is not
intended to be in any sense authoritative. My
concern here is not to bind an example of present
day work to the past in any relation of derivation,
but rather to simply attempt some rhetorical
reiteration of the idea I proposing which sees
present day contemporary art practices as existing
within cultural climates the conditions of which
were in part forged in the relation of conceptual
art to the social world, and which sees in the
work of the present the deployment of what are
now representational and discursive conventions
also first proposed within conceptual art. And
so my subjects are chosen loosely, if willfully:
the last exhibition I viewed in Christchurch
prior to Symposium 2000 Peter Robinsons
Point
of Infinite Destiny (1999), presented at
the Robert McDougall Art Annexand one of the
works I was researching at that moment Jim Allens
O-AR 1 (1975) presented at Barry Lett
Galleries in Auckland. This is, in one sense,
sloppy art history, and I don't in any way mean
to propose a relation of awareness between these
two works (specifically that Robinson has any
knowledge of Allens practice), but nevertheless
I believe that this might serve a productive
purpose in indicating a general condition of
relation.
O-AR 1, was described by Wystan Curnow
as consisting of
two canvas sheets covering most of the gallery
floor, a heap of manuka sticks on one and, on
the other, some reinforcing metal, a metal footplate,
and some wire netting. And pinned to the wall
are sheets of paper covered with typewritten
statements blown up to various sizes, graphs,
mathematical calligraphy.
[19]
Allen has claimed a certain intuitive process
to the development of this work. The manuka
branches which were heaped together loosely
rather than laid out formally and different
forms of steel mesh were supposed to suggest
a very rudimentary dichotomy between organic
and manufactured forms. The sheets of paper
on the wall were actually graph paper used in
engineering calculations. The texts came from
various sources: the words CAT/SAT/MAT for example
were covered in rubber stamps like teachers
marks and derived from watching his own children
at play; elsewhere there were texts remarking
upon sculptural form and the processes by which
art or other objects may be created. The link
between these different registers of text was
their shared participation in processes of reasoning
and calculation. All the texts were about relationships
of one form or another structure paralleled
in the material organization of the exhibitions
components. But the work was also concerned
with the functioning of perception. Allen cut
words and phrases out of some of the statements
in order to test the manner in which the individual
viewer both perceived and constructed information
from limited elements.
Robinsons installation work was also fundamentally
concerned with the discursive function of information
flows of how language on one hand may accumulate
as itself superfluous detritus or on the other
may, perhaps even simultaneously along different
communicational vectors, flense itself of nonessential
detail as it pulses through the digital pathways
of our age, all the time traversing our consciousness
in evermore fugitive yet affective manners.
But as with Allens work this was conveyed through
a sort of catchall accumulation of sound-bite
phrases, calculating doodles, transient images
and above all material flotsam. Allen retrospectively
stated of
O-AR 1:
The work became very much a questioning of what
was there. This is what I personally value,
the presence of physical structures. The kind
of thinking and the kind of answers they generate
is central to the whole. Its a question of attenuating
or tensioning the things between the words even
more.
[20]
Here, clearly, is that active language / materiality
relation with which we began.
This, then, is Felicity Milburn on Robinsons
work:
Like a traveler's rucksack, a blue tarpaulin
unrolls to reveal a landing strip of debris,
a cosmic garage sale full of the everyday wreckage
of popular culture. Formed largely of downloads
from the Internet, this vast, uncatalogued swathe
of imagery echoes the sensation of rummaging
through sites on the world wide web. Like the
Internet, it is presented without explanation,
inviting us to navigate our own course through
the rubble and assemble a fresh narrative from
a set o seemingly random associations.
[21]
The viewer here is clearly asked to function
in almost exactly the same manner as that of
Allens work 25 years earlier. Further on Milburn
writes:
Within this assemblage of technology, the written
word stands out like a pariah from the rubble,
contrasting the personal with the global, and
the primitive with the sophisticated. Upside
down, inverted and fragmented, the words emphasize
the power of language to alienate as well as
align, with the almost-intelligible letters
leaving us teetering on the edge of understanding
even as they ultimately frustrate meaning.
[22]
Allens work, of course, was fundamentally concerned
with that state of teetering on the edge of
understanding. The conditions and imperatives
of one moment have drifted down to form the
basis of another.
Lets turn finally to Jim Allens three-part performance
work
Contact (1974) undertaken as part
of the
Four Men in a Boat project at
the Auckland City Art Gallery. It was Allens
first important performance work, but as I note
in my
Interventions essay
[23] marked an extension of rather than rupture
with many of the key determining characteristics,
questions and impulses of his preceding (and
subsequent) installation work: the setting up
of a system or structure within which acts of
exploration (on part of both artist and spectator)
take place, often in terms of physical articulations
of space to be moved around and through; the
enclosure as a (porous) boundary; the triggering
of interaction between dynamic clusters of bodies,
space and material forms; the investigation
of material occupations and articulations of
space as fluid dialogues or ever-changing relations
of corporeality; the determinacy of spectorial
presence upon the work; the relation of the
individual to the collective or the social;
and the cognitive capacity of the sensory body
and its relation to linguistic utterances, structures
and meaning.
The overall work involved three parts or activities.
The first,
Computer Dance, took place
within an area delineated by metal tubing and
hanging, weighted nylon and subject to bright,
flashing lights. Four pairs of performers operated
handheld emitter/receiver devices connected
to audio speakers. A narrow beam of light was
sent between the emitter/receiver devices. When
the two devices were in alignment (in perfect
contact) a perfect high-pitched tone was heard
from the speaker (the devices also vibrated
slightly to give a greater sense of contact
to the performers).
In
Paragole Capes four performers were
assisted in dressing in layers of calico and
hessian (each performer in a different colour).
The final layer completely enclosed them in
a sack-like structure. Each of the four then
began to move to the centre of a cube-structure
in the gallery, articulating strange sounds
as explorative (pre-linguistic) communication
and testing what movement was left available
to them by their garments (or enclosures). Once
they had met in the middle (after around an
hour) they used their teeth to free each other,
hanging their garments or capes over the frame,
enclosing themselves in a protective cube.
Finally, in
Body Articulation/Imprint six
performers each took up position on a large
sheet of polythene over white paper next to
a bucket of paint (a different colour for each
performer). Each performer smeared paint over
their joints and began to move, the colour indicating
the movement of their body. They each then covered
the rest of the body with paint and made a body
imprint on the plastic covered floor (at its
peripheries), now recording the movement of
their body. Then the performers moved closer
to the centre of the proscribed space, formed
into pairs, and explored colour changes through
dual movement.
My
Interventions essay included a short
critique of
Contact. I wrote that the
work was clearly concerned with seeking some
form of transcendence of or release from both
societal alienation and individual anxiety through
collective action. Being highly structured in
conception and confined within an institutional
space there was however, I claimed, a substantial
difference between the structuring and location
of this work and that, for example, of Phil
Dadsons Purposeless Work actions where although
given an initial direction and set of parameters
(a plot or score) individual performers were
presented with a more fluid context and environment
for improvisation or autonomous action. Yet
I maintained that
Contact could also
not be too closely equated to other complex,
structured gallery-based performance works such
as those undertaken by Bruce Barber and Kieran
Lyons as the latter two artists generally also
assumed the role of (sole or principal) performer
within more theatrical or narrative-based situations,
thus testing the propositions via their own
sensual experience. I stated that Christina
Barton was accurate in her criticism of
Contact
as risking over-determination of the limits
and conditions of its participants experiences.
[24] There was, I proposed, a social laboratory
sense to the work, an exploration of social
dynamics within a controlled field of spectacle.
[25]
The question I wish to ask here however is this:
On what basis can someone such as myself base
these assertions? This in turn necessitates
asking: How have I encountered the work? And
how does the form of this encounter effect,
even determine my analysis? My primary encounter
is through the works documentation in the book
edited by Allen and Curnow and published in
1976,
New Art: Some recent New Zealand sculpture
and post-object art.
[26] That is, this encounter, which is in fact at best a secondary
encounter, is with a visual and textual document.
The works materiality and its particular action
through time have necessarily been elided. There's
clearly a certain irony in this encounter as
visual with a work at least partially if not
wholly predicated upon the refutation of the
hegemony of the visual as representational or
experiential, cognitive mode. (This is, of course,
one of the fundamental conundrums bequeathed
contemporary art by conceptualism.) It is important
that we recognise that here the work exists
in its visual form as a set of photographs by
Bryony Dalefield worked into a publication format;
that is we have other representational registers
of intervening or mediating consciousness and
action. The textual element is also crucial
here. The documentation of
Contact that
appears in this book includes substantial descriptive,
explanatory text by the artist from which my
own earlier description is obviously drawn.
At the end of this explanatory text are two
further important textual elements. First, a
reflective comment section by Allen, certainly
not critical in stance and perhaps in fact still
rather idealistic in its prescriptive tone but
nevertheless revealing in the sense of conceptual
intent. And second, a lengthy critical reflection
upon the work by Guy von Sturmer. This latter
text is particularly interesting for the relation
it establishes with the work, but in fact also
constantly destabilises as if this were necessary
to draw out as many of the works experiential
and rhetorical implications as might be possible.
Von Sturmers text weaves in and out of a first
person description of the experience of the
work and a reflective overview of the piece
as a singular entity (that is as an artwork
offered in tact for contemplation and consumption).
I don't have space here to review von Sturmers
text in any detail. Rather, I wish to simply
suggest how it is indicative of much of the
writing of, at, and around post object or conceptual
art in New Zealand at this time.
In this regard the work of Wystan Curnow is
especially important, in particular his textual
commentary undertaken as participant in the
actual performative time of Barbers
Mt Eden
Crater Performance of 1974 and published
in
New Art as almost a textual component
of the work itself as it necessarily exists
within a dispersed field of documentation beyond
its real time experiential moment; and also
his lengthy commentaries on early Peter Roche/Linda
Buis performance works which oscillate between
self-reflexive pressuring of his own condition
as participating audience or receiver of the
work and a search for the appropriate discursive
space for critical deliberation upon the work
as anterior object.
[27] In many senses what such writing
does is pressure the very conception of work
as anterior to its presence in both concurrent
and subsequent imaginative, textual, and /or
linguistic reflection. Similar textual models
are found in artists own writings reflecting
back upon ephemeral performance works.
[28] These often provide productive
counterpoints to the schematic textual or diagrammatic
models that form a crucial genesis or discursive
frame to such works.
A further crucial textual model that of the
group discussion is also found in both
New
Art with the text of a post-performance
analytical discussion about Barbers
Bucket
Action (1974) involving the performer and
closely aligned audience members or assistants.
Group discussions regarding and in fact taking
place within each of Allens
O-AR exhibitions
are also presented in an artists publication
of the same title. In my
Interventions
essay I discussed the possible basis of this
analytical model as well as its significance
as a social model as being sourced in explorative
educational frameworks introduced to Elam by
Allen from 1969 onwards.
[29] Here I simply wish to draw attention to the manner in which
such a discursive structure this interlacing
of diverse critical perspectives actually provides
(perhaps unwittingly) certain foundational principles
for the subsequent development of critical models
of both art and criticism in New Zealand. The
key aspect here is that inescapable self-reflexivity
of a text constructed from multiple voices each
adopted position will necessary be drawn into
a reckoning with the conditions of its particular
actions and with the assumptions and conventions
it draws upon and which it may need to challenge.
Furthermore, such texts reinforce the potentiality
of fluid speaking positions within a single
text. Indeed the predilection for the present
tense which we witness in so much contemporary
art criticism can also be sourced to this period
of experimental criticism where an active relation
to the work is sought a form of interdependency
(and here we again approach that notion of the
inseparability of the work from its critical
response)in which we might locate a kind of
purchase upon the work in its very being
ness
that inflects both contemporary critical writing
and that idea mentioned earlier of the artworks
inbuilt critical function.
These three factors critical self-reflexivity,
mutability of subject position and interdependence
of the form of the work and its critical function
along with the mixing of phenomenological self-awareness
with a structural/post-structural approach to
representational relativity and agency have
undoubtedly fuelled the critical orthodoxies
of both artists and critics of my generation.
Language, self-criticality, the establishment
and disruption of systems (in textual plans)
contingency of meaning, the visual field (whether
static or video toying with connotation of in-time)this
finally is what I seek to evoke in making claim
to that wake of conceptualism that is also constituent
element, even definitional condition of the
contemporary.
© Blair French 2000/2001
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