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CRITICAL FORMS:

THE WAKE OF CONCEPTUALISM

Blair French

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?

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 thingnessfrom 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 objectness, 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 beingness 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.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT'S

This text is based upon a paper presented at Symposium 2000: An International Conference on Post-Object Art in New Zealand, Centra Hotel, Christchurch, 12 November 2000. Sections of this paper dealing with the work of Jim Allen were first published in the essay Jim Allen: From Elam to the EAF, in Jennifer Hay and Felicity Milburn (eds), Interventions: Post Object and Performance Art in New Zealand in 1970 and Beyond (Christchurch: Robert McDougall Art Gallery and Annex, 2000).

Research towards this text and the conference paper on which it is based was undertaken under the auspices of an Australian Research Council Large Grant to Professor Terry Smith at the Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, University of Sydney, to study the history of conceptualism in Australia, New Zealand, the USA, and Europe.

AUTHOR

Blair French studied Art History and English at the University of Canterbury during the 1980s and is a writer and curator presently based in Sydney. He is editor of Photo Files: An Australian Photography Reader (Sydney: Power Publications and Australian Centre for Photography, 1999) and has written extensively on contemporary Australian and New Zealand art. Having previously worked in public galleries and contemporary art spaces in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom he is presently writing a book for Piper Press, Sydney on the work of twelve contemporary Australian photo-artists as well as a doctoral thesis at the University of Sydney entitled Picture This: The Photographic Image as Contemporary Art.


[1] NOTE TO EDITORS NEED TO REFERENCE TITLE OF CURNOWS PUBLISHED TEXT HERE AND PAGE NUMBERS OF ITS PRINTING IN THIS PUBLICATION.

[2] Interview with Robert Leonard, Pander 6/7 (1999) 38.

[3] ibid.

[4] See for example: Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1999); Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 1998); Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (eds), Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975 (exh. cat.) (Los Angeles and Cambridge, Mass.: Museum of Contemporary Art and The MIT Press, 1995); Philomena Mariani (ed.), Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s1980s (exh. Cat) (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999); and Anne Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001).

[5] See for example: Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 1995, The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Bollingen Series xv.44) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), and Appoaching the End of Art, in The State of the Art (New York: Prentice Hall, 1987) 202-18; Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art?, Christopher Wood (trans.) (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1987); Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, Michael Shaw (trans.), Jochen Schulte-Sasse (fwd.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); and Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge Mass. and London: October, The MIT Press, 1996).

[6] Even in terms as simple as having raised the stakes or expectations of a critical art practice and having encouraged a sense of tacticality (which I would like to think of in terms of socially interventionist strategy) within New Zealand art, both of which were insightful observations made from the floor by Rob Garrett during Symposium 2000.

[7] NOTE TO EDITORSNEED TO REFERENCE TITLE OF BARTONS REVISED PUBLISHED TEXT WHETHER THIS IS IN THIS JOURNAL OR IN ACTION REPLAY PUBLICATION.

[8] Which of course by no means implies a displacement of the central subjectthe specific practices of specific artistswithout which these broader issues could barely be raised, let alone be seen to gain any real purchase upon the conditions of lived experience.

[9] I had in mind here particularly a three phase model of the development of key investigative drives within conceptual art being developed by Professor Terry Smith at the University of Sydney.

[10] See Terry Smith, Peripheries in Motion: Conceptualism and Conceptual Art in Australia and New Zealand, in Mariani (ed.), Global Conceptualism, 89.

[11] In addition to Christina Bartons essay in this publication see for example: Tony Godfrey, Looking at Others: Artists Using Photography, in Conceptual Art, 301-42; Charles Green, Avoiding art, desperately seeking photography: Revising the history of photography by post-object art, in Ewen McDonald with Judy Annear (eds), What is this thing called photography? (Sydney: Pluto Press in association with the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Trans/forming Cultures Research Group, University of Technology, Sydney, 2000) 17-35; John Roberts (ed.), The Impossible Document: Photography and Conceptual Art in Britain 1966-1976 (London: Camerawork, 1997); Anne Rorimer, Photography: Restructuring the Pictorial, in New Art in the 60s and 70s, 113-53; and Jeff Wall, Marks of Indifference: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art, in Goldstein and Rorimer (eds), Reconsidering the Object of Art, 247-67.

[12] Blair French, Jim Allen: From Elam to the EAF, in Jennifer Hay and Felicity Milburn (eds), Interventions: Post Object and Performance Art in New Zealand in 1970 and Beyond (exh. cat.) (Christchurch: Robert McDougall Art Gallery & Annex, 2000) 35-46.

[13] In Smiths terms the first moves of conceptualism involved the production of conceptual objects that threw perception into doubt. See Smith, Peripheries in Motion, 88.

[14] ibid., 89.

[15] And theres clearly an easy metonymy we could enact between the terms post object and photography here.

[16] Here I am drawing upon and to a degree supplementing what Terry Smith has identified as the core minimal-conceptual nexus sitting as the basis of the development of contemporary practice in Australia. See Terry Smith, Generation X: The Impacts of the 1980s, in Rex Butler (ed.), What is Appropriation? An Anthology of Critical Writings on Australian Art in the 80s and 90s (Sydney and Brisbane: Power Publications and Institute of Modern Art, 1996) 249-259.

[17] Jeff Wall, Introduction: Partially Reflective Mirror Writing, in Dan Graham, Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art, Alexander Alberro (ed.) (Cambridge Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1999) xii.

[18] ibid.

[19] Wystan Curnow, Project Programme 1975, Nos 1-6, ACAG Quarterly 62-63 (1976) 23.

[20] Jim Allen, transcript of gallery discussion, in O-AR: Jim AllenRecent Work (Auckland: 1975) n.p.

[21] Felicity Milburn, Road to Nowhere, in Peter Robinson: Point of Infinite Destiny (exh. cat.) (Christchurch: Robert McDougall Art Annex, 1999) n.p.

[22] ibid.

[23] See French, Jim Allen: From Elam to the EAF, 38-9.

[24] See Christina Barton, Post-Object Art in New Zealand 19691979: Experiments in Art and Life, unpublished MA thesis (University of Auckland, 1987) 169.

[25] See French, Jim Allen: From Elam to the EAF, 40.

[26] Jim Allen and Wystan Curnow (eds), New Art: Some recent New Zealand sculpture and post-object art (Auckland: Heinemann Educational, 1976).

[27] See for example Wystan Curnow, Peter Roche and Linda Buis: Liaison, Art Network 2 (1980), 23-4.

[28] Peter Roche, for example, wrote a number of unpublished essays on his own performance works around 1979 and 1980 which can be found in the Open Drawer post-object art files at the Elam School of Fine Art Library at University of Auckland.

[29] See French, Jim Allen: From Elam to the EAF, 36.