Language in the vicinity of art: artists' writings, 1960-1975

"I DON'T LIKE THE INCORPORATION OF THE NAMABLE IN SOULPTURE" Carl Andre's observation from a 1968 interview mirrors on the absence of image or allusion in advanced art of the period, on the other hand it remains pithily ironic: It is individual hallmark of American art between roughly 1960 and 1975 that particulars and installations were attended by the agency of massive quantities of artists' words, body s that fall across the artmaking landscape and bench like a heavy discursive drift. For individual thing, artists were critics: Donald Judd reviewed dozens of exhibitions in fresh York galleries from 1959 to 1965 and compos several essays, of that kind as "Specific Objects," in which he attempted to describe and account for the changing ontology of painting and sculpture; during the late '60 and early '70 Mel Bochner overlayed exhibitions of new art in the critical press; the two Bochner and Robert Morris compos defining theoretical texts--concerning seriality and "anti-form," for example--of post-Minimalism. on the other hand words--concrete verse (Andre), transitive verb (Richard Serra), logical propositions (Bochner) "statements" (Lawrence Weiner), quasi-absurdist formulations (Sol LeWitt), the transgressive attenuation of banal articulate utterance (Bruce Nauman), the scientizing harangue (Robert Smithson), the magazine piece (Dan Graham)--were also repeatedly inseparable from the art itself. A proliferation of writing and other applications of language clearly distinguishes this generation. If we include avant-garde filmmakers--and considering in what manner important film was to, say, Smithson and Serra, we probably should--the number of writers high hills even further. What does all of the activity betray? Is it a practice or a syndrome?

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Above all, writing is thinking, reasoning end Exegesis can also signify the voice of authority: through setting the discourse, the artist as critic means to situate himself in the position of preemptive arbiter of ideas. That is, running commentary can subserve as a cover. "No contemplation exists without a sustaining support," Bochner wrote in 1969 as an epigraph to a preparatory rough draught for his inscribed wall drawing Theory of Boundaries, 1969-70 which posits the inseparability of any inference about the coordinates of space from its real or thinkable visualization (the "support," a paragram on the conventional role of the canvas) or its symbolic relationship to the world end language. He might as well have been describing the physical and symbolic character of the written or printed page as a earth of risk, even uncertainty, during the '60 for that is also what it is. Where the wall or the floor or the filled coordinates of a room had been newly and assertively negotiated as art spaces that were coextensive with the physical space of the material substance the page might be said to have functioned instead as the receptacle for something like an anxiety of interpretation.

This is not a case of the manifesto; profess rhetoric is as old as the idea of the avant-garde, although the distinction is somewhat difficult to quantify. The novel writing was more often didactic and theoretically aware, and the efficiency level--demonstrated by sheer volume--peculiarly intense. Significantly, many of these artists' body s have been collected and anthologized. above the past decade, subjects of published convolutions have included Judd, Morris, Serra, Smithson (in separate English and German editions), and Graham (as well as Frank Stella, whose prelections postdate the period in question). abundant more recently, in the past year or thus writings and interviews by Bochner (a bilingual French edition with many of the essays reproduc in facsimile), Nauman, and ed Ruscha have appeared. At least sum of two units artists are still awaiting special treatment: Letters and statements by the agency of Dan Flavin, composed in an exalted and sometimes caustic voice, are lengthy overdue for a critical anthology; they single intermittently appear in old exhibition catalogues. Perhaps more important, Andre's objectlike poems--manuscripts, typewritten sheets, and collages, which together would tend hitherward to serve as a form of drawing in his work--are almost impossible to find, while his remarkable interviews are scattered in rayless periodicals and known mostly from one side excerpts (the most recent example, which appeared in the posthumous edition of interviews with artists through David Sylvester, challenges almost everything we cogitation we knew about this manifold figure). Only Andre's early "dialogues" with Hollis Frampton have been published, in a pioneering series of artists' writings from this period published through the press of the Nova Scotia body of Art and Design that is lengthy out of print. With regard to the appearance of novel anthologies, it might be possible at first glance to identify a publishing coincidence--one that shows turn-of-the-century historical perspective on a generation that has now penetrateed its late phase--rather than a coherent generational devotion to art writing and the relevance of the word. on the contrary notwithstanding important exceptions--such as Henri Matisse, Kasimir Malevich, Marcel Duchamp, and Alberto Giacometti, as well as Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman, sum of two units key figures from the previous generation (long exhibited by anthologies)--a writing phenomenon of this kind in the visual arts is, in fact, unique.