The synthetic proposition

Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art

Nizan Shaked

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781784992767
• eBook ISBN: 9781526119421
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Traces two intersecting trajectories in American art. It shows how rights-based 1960s politics and the identity politics of the 1970s influenced the development of Conceptual art (with a capital 'C') into the diverse set of practices generally characterised as conceptualist (with a lower-case 'c').

1
Conceptual Art and identity politics: from the 1960s to the 1990s

When we have revolutionary conferences, rallies, and demonstrations, there should be full participation of the gay liberation movement and the women's liberation movement. Some groups might be more revolutionary than others. We should not use the actions of a few to say that they are all reactionary or counter-revolutionary, because they are not. (Huey P. Newton (1970))¹

In the eighties, none of my students knew what Conceptualism was. I believe, along the lines of Hal Foster's theorization, that sometimes the return of certain kinds of aesthetic production can have more impact than their original presentations. It's obvious with Duchamp that this was the case. But although I was calling for the return of Conceptualism, in a way, I wasn't presenting this inadequate history in order to point to the pathos of something that had had its day and passed. I was trying to use the failures of memory to point to the problems of some theorizations and discourses around the return. (Silvia Kolbowski (2001))²

An approach that foregrounds ideas over the visual appearance of art, conceptualism is now understood as having multiple points of derivation and encompassing varying artistic attitudes. This chapter asks how a precisely articulated set of practices, defined by artists in the 1960s as Conceptual Art, evolved into a broad notion of conceptualism, and how the latter had expanded into its present forms. I use the proper name “Conceptual Art” to refer to the New York movement of the 1960s and its European affiliates, or the United Kingdom based Art & Language group, while “conceptualism” designates a more diverse set of tendencies, or when referring to both.³ Within this expanding chronicle characteristic trajectories have gradually been defined from broader methodological and geographical perspectives.⁴ This chapter shows how, in the United States’ context, some of the most important strategies of conceptualism developed through the influence of contemporaneous politics, more specifically the transition from Civil Rights into Black Power, the New Left, the anti-war movement, feminism, and gay liberation, as well as what later came to be collectively named “identity politics” in the 1970s. Almost all critics and historians have, throughout this period, considered conceptualism and art concerned with identity as two separate developments, and not as they in fact occurred—intertwined and deeply related. Practitioners and historians of conceptualism defined it as a debate with the formalist approaches that preceded it. In contrast, they considered identity politics as a return to a reliance on artistic subjectivity, narrative or figurative strategies, and essentialist definitions of selfhood, and therefore harboring reactionary modernist attitudes. Indeed, there was a paradox to identity politics, because to approach the political question through identity was to self-define using the very terms that constituted oppression and how it was transmitted in language and culture.⁵ However, a range of artists that can be defined, or who have self-defined, as conceptualists, incorporated the lessons of rights movements in a critical capacity, synthesising Conceptual analytic approaches with an outlook on identity formation as a means of political agency, and not as a representation of the self, a strategy that significantly expanded in the 1970s. In other words, one of the biggest influences on the development of Conceptual Art into conceptualism was identity politics.

Identity as model

Two major aspects of identity politics have impacted the field of art. The first, activist and administrative, consisted of protests against existing institutions, the development of action groups and collectives, and the subsequent formulation of alternative spaces. Both public protest and shifts in artistic practice propelled practitioners in the field to agitate for institutional change and affected attitudes towards practice. By the late 1960s conceptualism and rights movements overlapped in protesting the institutional framework of art, with manifold opinions, attitudes, ideologies, and agendas exchanged through a proliferation of collective activities reflecting both friction and mutual influences. One of the first events, organised in 1968 by a group of African-American artists and critics, was a protest at the Whitney Museum's failure to include black artists in their exhibition The 1930s: Painting and Sculpture in America.⁶ Soon thereafter, in January of 1969, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) was formed by some of the same protestors in dissent of the Metropolitan Museum's exhibition Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America 1900–1968. Rather than exhibiting actual artworks of artists living and working a few blocks away, the display at the Met featured images and projections about African-American culture.⁷ The BECC aimed to address the widespread exclusions practiced by this flagship art institution and demanded control of self-representation and inclusion through employment and exhibition opportunities.

At approximately the same time the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) was formed around the demand of artists to control the exhibition of their own work.⁸ Soon thereafter they expanded their focus and their ranks to address a wide set of political concerns, most notably the Vietnam War and the racist discrimination exercised by museums. From the diverse perspectives expressed at the AWC public forums, the two major approaches to political art can be generalised.⁹ The first is by Conceptual artists who regarded their intervention into the definition of art as the political act. The second is by those who saw politics as subject matter to be communicated through images or narrative. Those who favoured pictorial or conceptual abstraction saw the return of subject matter in art as necessarily reactionary, and not as the attack on what were foundationally hierarchical structures. Yet, a new attitude was emerging that synthesised the two approaches, where artists committed to an analytic focus positioned their political intervention as an enquiry into the vocabulary of art. They made visible how meaning itself was already an outcome of a world ordered by economic relations, class, race, gender, and sexuality, focusing the attention of the viewer onto the question of how those meanings get established, formed in language, and distributed by visual vocabularies. They introduced the political referent as a systematic question advanced through an analytic model.

The second aspect of identity politics was the bearing that it had on artistic strategy, form, and subject matter. The latter can be generally split into two discernible approaches: one that took a critical outlook on identity formation, and another that relied on it, representing the artist as a subject of identity or difference. I focus on the former, acknowledging the important contribution of strategic identity or community-based approaches whose influence has changed forms, minds, and policies; they belong to the wide field of oppositional art practices.¹⁰ Within the many approaches that fall under this umbrella term, there existed a mode of cross-identity politics influenced not by subjective identity, but by the principles of a critical minority perspective.¹¹ This critical identity politics took identity as a rubric, one that could be inhabited by a number of subject positions, and through which commonality of struggle could be articulated. Thus, while identity-based politics stemmed from situated knowledge, the various ways in which their influence spread complicated the distinction between a universal conception of the political subject and the particular aspect of the question of rights. Étienne Balibar has since argued that, unless it remains utterly theoretical, the concept of universality can only function through paradoxical co-existence of the particular as universal, since universal ideas eventually come to be materialised in life, inevitably “lowering” them to specific examples, while a concept of a universal subject remains forever abstract and idealised.¹² Modeled after Civil Rights, various permutations of identity politics in the United States were rooted in the socioeconomic circumstances of their respective formations and have defined their modes of political action accordingly. Moving on the axis between universalist approaches and their concrete implementations, in reality, a clear separation of the two has proved impossible to define beyond utterly theoretical paradigms. Instead Civil Rights became one model of political action, and so did its potential to radicalise. I look specifically at those instances that I find apply from one typology of identity politics into another, defining, for example, both Civil Rights and The Black Panther Party, in relation to identity politics, instead of rendering the former as a reformist model versus the latter as a revolutionary one. The political rhetoric of both has been directly influential on the field of art.

Organised in 1991 by art historian Michele Wallace, the ground-breaking symposium “Black Popular Culture” offered an interdisciplinary comparison of questions surrounding “black nationalism, essentialism and Pan-Africanism.”¹³ In her presentation “Black Nationalism: the Sixties and the Nineties” Angela Davis recalled the development of her political position from identity politics to communism, showing how ideas morphed, how complex and contradictory essentialist discourses of empowerment could, on the one hand, be reified, but on the other, open up possibilities for inter-group alliances. Davis cited the Black Panther Party newsletter of 1970, where Huey P. Newton wrote a letter “urging an end to verbal gay bashing, urging an examination of Black male sexuality, and calling for an alliance with the developing gay liberation movement.”¹⁴ Newton was inspired by Jean Genet, who was smuggled into the United States in 1970 by the Panthers, to speak...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Conceptual Art and identity politics: from the 1960s to the 1990s
• 2 Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism
• 3 The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art
• 4 The political referent in debate: identity, difference, representation
• 5 Institutional gender: from Hans Haacke’s Systems Theory to Andrea Fraser’s feminist economies
• A state of passionate detachment: Charles Gaines by way of conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index