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instruction poems / instruction paintings
I've been reading a little more deeply into the history of Conceptual Art lately, as part of a broader investigation into imperative / instructional language. (I'm working on a series of poems written in the form of "instructions.")
The history of Conceptual Art is important to students of instructions because somewhere in that history the emphasis shifts from the production of actual, material, "artistic" objects to instead the production of plans or instructions for artworks. The plans themselves, then, become the artist's work; whether the artwork that they posit is ever realized, or whether it even can be realized, is immaterial.
Ideas alone can be works of art. ... All ideas need not be made physical.
—Sol LeWitt, "Sentences on Conceptual Art," 1969
The main book I'm reading is Conceptual Art : A Critical Anthology, edited by Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson. It picks 1966 as the starting date for Conceptual Art (the same date Lucy Lippard starts with in her excellent book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, 1966-1972). The figure presented as the central figure with reference to instruction pieces, in the Alberro & Stimson anthology, seems to be Lawrence Weiner. In 1968, Weiner begins to present the artwork only in the form of a statement, say for instance his 1969 piece ONE QUART GREEN EXTERIOR INDUSTRIAL ENAMEL THROWN ON A BRICK WALL. (Interestingly, Weiner doesn't use the imperative form, which he describes as "fascistic.")
Weiner receives a lot of praise from various writers contributing to the book for the way that his pieces de-commodify art (since the text is the art, they can be transmitted by any medium, including word of mouth; in addition, anyone who wants to "actualize" the piece described can do so by simply buying the materials and performing the action). All of these things are true, but I'm puzzled as to why he's presented as the vanguard figure here, as his pieces do not seem substantially different from work being produced nearly a decade earlier by artists associated with the Fluxus group, most notably Dick Higgins and Yoko Ono.
In 1962, Yoko Ono exhibits "instructions as paintings" at Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, the earliest piece anthologized in the Instruction Paintings anthology dates to 1961.
PAINTING TO SEE THE SKIES Drill two holes into a canvas.
Hang it where you can see the sky. (Change the place of the hanging.
Try both the front and the rear windows,
to see if the skies are different.) Summer 1961
Occuring concurrently is Higgins' Danger Music series, a set of linguistic scores for conceptual "music":
DANGER MUSIC NUMBER ONE Spontaneously catch hold of a hoist hook and be raised up at least three stories. April 1961
I find the total omission of Higgins and Ono from Conceptual Art : A Critical Anthology to be peculiar at best and troubling at worst. Why aren't either of them mentioned even in Joseph Kosuth's essay "Art After Philosophy," in which he cites pre-66 forerunners to Conceptual Art such as Robert Morris' Card File (1962) or Rauschenberg's Erased DeKooning Drawing (1953)? (I wonder particularly if Ono's omission can't be chalked up to art-world sexism and racism.) Labels: art, conceptual art, instructions |
