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September 25, 2005
Hunt
Exhibition of works by local artists in the beautiful Queens Wood. [3-4 sept]
Real-estate house of cards
The problem is that unlike, say, watercolour, conceptual art's only virtue is in its adamantine insistence on radical innovation, its unstinting pursuit of dissolution. It's only this notional attachment to world-historical significance that lends the often ridiculous and tedious pranks of conceptual art their cachet. This industrious working-through of art-historical narratives is maladapted to the gently-questing spirit of the uneasy middle-classes. So that the well-meaning amateur, student – or, let's be frank, any artist outside of the privileged class who write its history – is as unlikely to make any "progress" in conceptual art as in astronomy or particle physics.
Pure conceptual art is a single, exclusive lineage, pursued without mercy for the audience; a trail blazed once and for all time, and from which any deviation is mere irrelevant embroidery. But can we be generous enough to allow an "impure" conceptual art? A synthetic conceptual art which would put back together the pieces of this scorched earth, and bring the multiplicity of sensation beck into the dried-out husk of conceptuality? If such an art is possible, it will require a thorough thinking-through. As long as this is not accomplished, nearly all conceptual art will continue to labour under a misapprehension, hallucinating a certain room to maneouvre which is simply not there. As a result, we will be (as we are) repeatedly subjected to repetitions of the same gestures. The only way in which we are able to receive these will be by focussing on differences in expression, and so conceptual art will become an inverted sensualism-by-mistake, a sleepwalking. At most, artists will be filling in the gaps in a wholly-prescribed grid of possibilities, and moreover a grid which expresses a nineteenth-century question which was already answered in the early twentieth. Can we shift the game to a different place? Again, this will require encore un effort.
The reality today is that practically, conceptual art survives not on its 'conceptuality', but on its sensual, material reality, which, however, remains largely unthought within its own discourse (although even the greatest conceptual art would be nothing but degenerate philosophy without its 'perceptual' component). This can even be seen in retroaction with 'classic' contemporary art, where the appeal of 70s conceptual work depends as much on a market-led fetish for yellowing typescripts and crackly video as for the conceptual moves, now banal, which they originally annotated. But then, conceptual art has always been fundamentally tied to the market, in parallel with the metanarratives of art history.
Ultimately, you can't help thinking that such artists' aspirations are misplaced and doomed to be without issue. In this selection of work, the most affecting were not the bad puns and the portentous but ultimately banal statements (nothing more telling of exhaustion than the glib use of words in conceptual art, "to make you think"), but those that made use of the environment to create something truly singular.
not art
My own 'found' work: half-torso reclining
Posted by robin at September 25, 2005 11:04 AM