When I reviewed Sara
Baume’s A Line Made By Walking on
this blog ( 22 April 2018) it got me thinking again about conceptual art, something I hadn’t
really done for twenty years – my last serious engagement, a long piece I wrote
in response to the 1997 Turner Prize exhibition, the prize won by Gillian Wearing:
So now I wrote a short
essay setting out my principal (and non-original) objection to conceptual art,
that you don’t need to experience it first hand to talk about it – a fact which
makes all the expenditure of time and effort and use of (expensive) gallery
space seem rather pointless. A version of this essay appears in the bi-monthly Philosophy Now (Issue 129, December
2018/January 2019).
Then I thought I ought
to find out what others had been thinking since I did my thinking in 1997 and
Amazon pointed me towards the 2007 book I am now reviewing. For a collection of
essays by professional philosophers, it’s really quite readable. Most
contributors proceed charitably, trying to find a way or ways to accommodate
conceptual art (whether narrowly or loosely defined) within the traditions of
mostly gallery-based visual art. If anything, they bend over backwards to give
it legitimacy.
If it is accepted that conceptual
art is an art of ideas, then for example it’s possible to argue that the ideas
have aesthetic value rather in the way that a mathematical proof can be elegant
or a chess move beautiful – this is an argument developed by Elisabeth
Schellekens (page 85 for the specific examples I have given). But this leaves
the question open, Why do we need anything more
than the ideas? Why do we need the installation or the performance, the bit
that costs money and takes up our time and a gallery space?
Schellekens uses the
word “boldness” and another contributor speaks of the audaciousness of
conceptual art. The founding work for conceptualism, Duchamp’s Fountain (a male urinal) is endlessly
talked about, even now, because it took nerve
and cheek to put the urinal into an
art gallery, and nerve and cheek often get us talking. Lots of people could have
had the ideas which conceptual art occupies itself with; very few people would
have dared do anything about them in the fashion done by conceptual artists. So the embodied bits of the ideas are provocations, though it may be very unclear what they are meant to provoke. In contrast, an anarchist who throws a bomb or a terrorist who plants one usually has a clear idea of what they want to provoke.
The invocation of boldness and audaciousness is meant to give point to the installations and the performances. But
Schellekens realises that this move effectively links conceptual art to things like jokes
and satirical cartoons (page 86) and Margaret Boden references (page 228) the
rather embarassing case of Alphonse Allais, a nineteenth century Parisian
prankster who got there before the po-faced artists of the 20th
century, already in the 1880s exhibiting a canvas painted entirely white and
titled Anaemic Young Girls Going To Their
First Communion Through a Blizzard.
I think the Allais case
allows a different take on conceptual art. I think most of it belongs in the
broader category of Pranks. Pranks usually involve someone in quite a lot of prior thought, maybe mixed in character and motive, and are realised by means which are intended to discomfort or shock some individual, group or institutition. The pranks performed by conceptual artists can, however, generally be grouped into a distinct sub-category of pranks by two important features:
(1)
Humourlessness
(2)
A
sense of entitlement to public funding and/or access to public exhibition space
So Sacha Baron Cohen
(Borat) is a contemporary prankster but not a conceptual artist because he aims
to make people laugh. And only as a prank would a prankster seek public funding
or an academic job or space in the Tate Gallery, but conceptual artists feel entitled
to all those things. This is consistent with the claims of an institutional theory
of art , which is also used several times in this volume as justification for
treating conceptual art as art (for example, by Lopes at page 241).
The obvious
counter-example to my claim (1) would be Banksy’s recent auto-destructive prank at Sotheby’s
which was indeed very funny. But that is in great contrast to most of the stuff the contributors to this book are labouring over.
*
My puzzlement about
conceptual art dates back to the early 1970s when Michael Corris and a
colleague from the US Art & Language group visited me in my rural Devon
cottage and solicited a contribution for their new journal The Fox of which three issues appeared and are now collectors’
items. Well, I didn’t really have anything which I felt appropriate but I
mentioned a draft study of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot which would have been my cover story for a second year in Paris
as a student with Roland Barthes had I stayed on after my first year. But I had
decided to return to England and a job, and so it had never been worked up or
shown to Barthes though a version in French existed. Anyway, to my surprise it
was accepted for The Fox and appeared
in issue 2 with small editorial additions which irritated me. But for the life
of me I did not understand how my essay fitted into their project.
That digression does
lead to a final point. Perhaps the core weakness of most conceptual art is that
the links between ideas and embodied work are so weak or so opaque, and the
ideas themselves so often confused, that really all we are offered (in most
cases) is an invitation to free associate.
So I think it likely that I got an essay published in The Fox
for no good reason because there was no editorial clear thinking about what
they were about and free association was the order of the day.
It is notable that in
this collection, even though contributors have been asked to reference at least
some among a number of selected works of conceptual art, that no one attempts a
serious, say, thousand word piece of
criticism which brings to life and understanding a particular piece of conceptual
art in its specificity. It’s my belief that most works of conceptual art could not bear the strain of
sustained critical reflection and that is a main reason why it does not happen.
Of course, there is plenty of humourless prose produced around conceptual art,
some of which ends up in Private Eye’s
Pseuds Corner.
Sometimes people know
exactly what they are doing. At other times, they haven’t a clue what they are
doing. For an artist, not quite knowing
what you are doing is not such a bad place to be. It can mean that you are in
the middle of some genuine exploration. Part of my problem with conceptual artists is that I'm not convinced that they are not quite knowing. Either they know exactly or they don't know at all.
