ANGEL AK I

journal of the theoretical humanities

volume 11 number 1 april 2006

he question I would like to pose is a simple

one: what relation have Deleuze and
Guattari to contemporary art? Perhaps this
question appears irrelevant given the frequency
with which contemporary art works are described
as nomadic, rhizomatic, deterritorialising, and embarking on a line of flight.
But Deleuze and Guattaris relation to contemporary art is not what this proliferation of terms
might suggest. In fact, contemporary art discourse has appeared ambivalent about Deleuze
and Guattaris most important aesthetic concepts
sensation and abstraction for the very good
reason that contemporary art has generally
subsumed these elements within its primary
commitment to the conceptual.
Conceptual art emerged in the 1960s, and since
this time all artistic practices have had to involve
a minimum of conceptual reflection in order to be
considered in any way contemporary. What, then,
can Deleuze and Guattari tell us about contemporary art when they reject both its conceptual
inheritance and an exhaustive list of its manifestations? This rejection seems to foreclose most
of the more interesting contemporary artistic
strategies of the last forty years. Most problematically, perhaps, this includes a rejection
of politicised aesthetic practices attacking
global capitalism, practices which continue to
be used, and perhaps continue to be useful,
today.
Before considering these strategies, however,
let us remind ourselves about Deleuze and
Guattaris rejection of Conceptual art from the
end of the chapter on aesthetics in What is
Philosophy? Broadly speaking it is part of the
books insistence that philosophy, science and
art are distinct areas of thought involving their
own materials and methods. More personally,

stephen zepke
THE CONCEPT OF ART
WHEN ART IS NOT A
CONCEPT
deleuze and guattari
against conceptual art
however, it is part of Deleuze and Guattaris
rather proprietal concern to protect philosophy
from what they call its shameless and inane
rivals (11). In this sense Conceptual art is an
example of the concept being usurped by the
ideas men (10; original emphasis) who produce
something of aesthetic value whose marketable
form has been determined by universals of
communication (11). As we shall see, there is
much to support Deleuze and Guattaris intuition
that these marketing managers include conceptual artists.
Conceptual art understands arts material as
linguistically defined concepts. This, Deleuze
and Guattari argue, dematerialises sensation by
banalising it.1 Conceptual art explores universal
truths of linguistic communication that are

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/06/010157^11 2006 Taylor & Francis Group

DOI: 10.1080/09697250600798052

157

against conceptual art

wilfully
mundane.
For
Deleuze
and
Guattari, conceptual practices achieve this in
three ways:
1. The priority of the concept allows for a
generalisation of materials whereby anything
can be art.
2. Conceptual artists enthusiastic embrace of
reproduction technologies transforms sensation
into information that is reproducible to
infinity (Deleuze and Guattari, What is
Philosophy? 198).
3. Conceptual practices neutralise arts ontological status by making sensation depend upon
the opinion of the viewer, who decides whether
or not it is art.
In the end these interlinked conceptual
strategies will produce neither sensations nor
concepts because by dematerialising art it is
rendered indiscernible from everyday life.
Furthermore, arts interest in linguistic universals
and its embrace of the banal perceptions and
affections of our mediatised world as the
democratic material allowing it to engage in
political life are, in fact, the components of arts
de-politicisation. Nevertheless, conceptual strategies remain important for politically engaged art
today, and it is these strategies that are rejected
by Deleuze and Guattari in a fairly comprehensive list.
The conceptual strategies that Deleuze and
Guattari reject for generalising arts materials and
producing what they call a neutralised plane of
composition are:
1. The catalogue as art work. This was a
popular practice in the 1960s, beginning with Mel
Bochners Working Drawings and Other Visible
Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be
Viewed as Art (1966), and becoming more widely
known with the catalogue shows organised by
Seth Siegelaub in 196869. An important related
practice was placing work directly into magazines
and newspapers.
2. The ground covered by its own map
(Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?
198). This is a slightly ambiguous statement that
could refer in a general sense to the widespread
use of maps in work of the 1960s, or to the
common practice of creating work through the

documentation of a process or the mapping of a

space.
3. The use of disused spaces without
architecture (Deleuze and Guattari, What is
Philosophy? 198). This was better known as
non-site or environmental art, and sought to
interrogate the museum by exploring its
outside.
4. The flatbed plane. This refers to Leo
Steinbergs well-known essay Other Criteria in
which he defines the flatbed plane as any
receptor surface on which data is entered, on
which information may be received, printed,
impressed whether coherently or in confusion.
Steinberg uses terms very close to Deleuzes when
he argues that on the flatbed plane the
painted surface is no longer the analogue of the
visual experience to nature but of operational
processes (Steinberg 84).2 In a broad sense,
Deleuze and Guattaris objection to the flatbed
plane is a rejection of its dematerialisation of
sensation into information, and in a more specific
sense it is a rejection of painting after abstract
expressionism.
These four practices all make the first error
of conceptual art, namely the neutralisation of the
compositional process by the concept that allows
anything to be art. The second error, we recall, is
the ubiquity of reproduction technologies infinitising sensation, and the third is the delegation to
the viewer of the judgement as to whether
something is art.
The first and third errors both emerge from
the readymade of Marcel Duchamp, and from
Duchamps famous requirement of visual
indifference in choosing it. The readymade
can be any object whatsoever as long as there
is, Duchamp argues, a total absence of good
or bad taste . . . In fact a complete anesthesia
(Duchamp 141). This artistic anaesthesia is the
founding statement of contemporary arts rejection of sensation, and is confirmed by
Duchamps insistence on the necessity of
secondary linguistic information to carry
the mind of the spectator towards other regions
more verbal (141). This anti-aesthetic
strategy allowed anything to be art, because
in fact making art was now defined as a
linguistic act. Similarly, when the viewer

158

zepke
decides what is and what is not art, the art
work loses its ontological consistency and
depends instead upon an epistemological definition. Where the first error neutralised the
artistic object, this democratisation of the
creative act attacks artistic subjectivity, and was
often connected to strategies where pre-formulated equations or concepts constituted the
art work, its materialisation being left to the
discretion of others.3
The reasons for Deleuze and Guattaris
categorical rejection of these conceptual strategies
are therefore similar in both cases; their
Duchampian negations of sensation de-ontologise
aesthetics by turning artistic practice into the
production and exploration of a linguistically
defined concept whose materialisation is either
secondary or redundant. One of the strongest
statements of Conceptual arts linguistic turn
came from Joseph Kosuth, who appealed directly
to logical positivism and the work of A.J. Ayer to
argue that Works of art are analytic propositions, and as such replace philosophy in
analysing arts formal qualities as a concept
(Kosuth 20). As Kosuth famously put it, this
gives us Art as Idea as Idea and means that the
objects he produced are not art but merely
secondary information that points us towards the
utterly immaterial art concept.4 On the other
hand, the work of Sol LeWitt develops
Duchamps assisted readymade technique in
terms of structuralist linguistics. For LeWitt:
The idea becomes a machine that makes the art
(LeWitt 834). The idea or concept linguistically
expressed provides a structural framework for
materialising the work. These systematic operations bore no trace of subjective content, and
produced an object LeWitt claimed was not too
important (834).
Both Conceptual art strategies emerging from
Duchamp explore art as a process of thought
producing concepts. On the one hand, Kosuths
project posits art as an analytical process of
philosophical self-reflection exploring the universal linguistic laws acting as its condition of
possibility. LeWitt, on the other hand, produces
a proposition defining the relation between a
constant law and its variable appearances that
utilises a quasi-scientific method.5 Deleuze and

159

Guattari reject both strategies as in the first case

a conflation of art and philosophy, and in the
second of art and science: The frames of art,
they write, are no more scientific coordinates
than sensations are concepts, or vice versa
(Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?
198).
Guattari has suggested that analytic and
structuralist linguistic theories are reductionist, and that this secret link led to their
finding a common home in American information
theory and cybernetic research after the war.6
These new sciences were very influential on
Conceptual art practices, a fact recognised by
Deleuze and Guattari in their second objection,
that Conceptual art dematerialises sensation by
transforming it into information available for
infinite reproduction.7 Deleuze and Guattari here
refer directly to Kosuths One and Three Chairs
(1965), describing the work without naming it or
the artist.8 At this point they sharpen their
criticism, for whereas they had originally claimed
that Abstract and Conceptual art do not
substitute the concept for the sensation, rather
they create sensations and not concepts (Deleuze
and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 198) now, and
following the description of Kosuths work, they
argue it is not at all clear that this way leads
either to the sensation or to the concept, because
the plane of composition tends to become
informative (198). There are three problems
when sensation becomes information: either it
becomes indiscernible from the ordinary perceptions and affections of the viewer, or the concept
is reduced to a proposition stating an opinion, or
to a doxa confirming the generic subject of urban
American social life.9 This dematerialisation of
art into information makes it indiscernible
from the banality of everyday life, a consenting
echo of the order words of capital. This is a strong
criticism of Conceptual art that goes to the heart
of its contemporary inheritance.
When art is defined as information or
a concept it loses its visual qualities, not
to mention its visionary ones. Conceptual
art has abandoned sensory-becoming for,
as Seth Siegelaub once called it, an experienceless art.10 Here the avant-garde becomes
a mechanism of homogenesis, where the desire

against conceptual art

to merge art with life simply evaporates art
rather than transforms life.11 Deleuze and
Guattari suggest instead a constructivist version
of the avant-garde minus its teleology where
art and life merge in the material processes
building the revolution, where a new life
requires a new art and both must be constructed
together.
For Deleuze and Guattari, then, conceptual
dematerialisation fails to construct a new reality,
and instead merely expresses its consensus with
the new conditions emerging in the 1960s.
Conceptual art embraced both the new technologies defining the emergence of the information
age in the 1960s, and the theorisations of this
transformation found in Systems theory and
Cybernetics. Many conceptual artists sought to
use these new technologies and theories critically,
attempting to turn them against the new forms of
exploitation they introduced.12 These developments also enabled a break with previous
aesthetic regimes, most notably with the modernist abstraction of Clement Greenberg.13 Art as
linguistic information marked the obsolescence
of the visual and was a categorical rejection of
Greenbergs materialist account of Modernist
abstraction and of its visual embodiment of a
transcendental dimension of aesthetic truth.14
Conceptual artists wanted art to engage the world,
and to this end they rejected high art and
embraced the everyday.
This embrace included the rejection of the
high market value associated with the Abstract
Expressionists whom Greenberg championed.
Interestingly, conceptual artists developed strategies for resisting their market appropriation that
have some similarities with more recent political
projects, especially those advocated by the Italian
radical left. Conceptual art offered a series of
negations as a being against or exodus, a
kind of dropping out taking place in the
aesthetic realm.15 First is the negation of the art
object, either by denying the art concept any
materiality at all, as with Kosuth, or by focusing
on the art concept, allowing the material of art to
be anything at all. This latter strategy was often
connected to a process of de-skilling, a refusal of
any special skills or materials that would give the
art object value. One of the best works of this

kind, and a brilliant parody of Pollocks work,

was Lawrence Weiners Two Minutes of Spray
Paint Directly upon the Floor from a Standard
Aerosol Can (1968).16 Sometimes these two
strategies were combined, as in Kosuths Second
Investigation, I. Existence (Art as Idea as Idea)
(1968) where the synopsis of categories from
Rogets thesaurus was published in various
newspapers and magazines, and pages torn from
these publications were exhibited. As an aesthetic
exodus, the point was not simply to negate the
object but to remove market value from it, either
through a banalisation of material and method or
through a reproduction of mass-media proportions, thereby making it available to anyone at
almost no cost.
The second exodus achieved by Conceptual
art was from the artistic subject and from arts
subjective experience. These were replaced by a
logical and scientific functionality, and the
emotionless production and experience of information. The artist no longer claimed any special
skills or function in producing the work, nor did
he or she attempt to give any subjective content
to their work.17 Conceptual arts strategic
removal of the art works monetary or subjective
value is summed up by Carl Andres remark that
if people are stupid enough to buy something
they could make themselves, that is their
problem. Art into life meant a democratisation
of art. Anyone could make it, anyone could own
it. But Andres political ambition for Conceptual
art proved unintentionally prescient, because
people really did want to buy these things they
could make themselves, not least because of
artists political ambitions. The people who
wanted to buy Conceptual art were the new
breed of corporate collectors emerging in the
quickly expanding marketing and media
worlds.18 These collectors were naturally filled
with enthusiasm for the profits this new commodity offered, but more interestingly they
understood Conceptual art in their own terms.
They understood exactly what dematerialising the
object and subject of capitalist value really meant:
not the end of capitalism but its new beginning.
Conceptual arts strategies of exodus merely
mimicked the two fundamental transformations
that were reshaping the market at the time,

160

zepke
namely the dematerialisation of the commodity
and the emergence of immaterial labour. In this
way Conceptual art conformed to rather than
resisted the logic of late capitalism.19
Furthermore, and despite their political ambitions, conceptual artists maintained enough of the
art object and subject to be recognised by the
market. Most important was the use of certificates
to authenticate an art work manufactured from
mass-produced objects, such as the neon works of
Dan Flavin, or to prove possession of a work with
no material existence, a device widely used by
artists such as Robert Barry or Lawrence Weiner.
This authentification guaranteed the art work as a
commodity and meant that as a signifier for the
contemporary, Conceptual arts attempt at political resistance could be exploited in full.
Similarly, artists like Joseph Kosuth cultivated
a highly marketable public persona built around
the intellectual skills required by the artist to be
plugged in and turned on in the information
age of global capital.
Conceptual artists belief that they could
collapse the market from within by withdrawing
themselves from it merely affirmed an outside of
everyday life that was as much controlled by
market forces as the art world. Conceptual art
operated through a dialectical avant-garde logic
which attempted to collapse the art work, and
with it the art world, into everyday life. But their
work rarely offers a critique on this life, and, as
Deleuze and Guattari argue, produces a passive
banality entirely complicit with the cynical
perceptions and affections of the capitalist
himself (Deleuze and Guattari, What is
Philosophy? 146).20
It is here that we can begin to see what the
contemporary stakes of a politicised aesthetic
practice really are, and how our conceptual
inheritance could be useful. Any strategy of
exodus must be a positive one, as Paolo Virno
puts it, the exit must be an unrestrained
invention which alters the rules of the game and
throws the adversary completely off balance
(Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude 70). This
can only be achieved, and here I think Deleuze
and Guattari in broad terms agree with Virno, by
founding a new republic, by constructing a new
world through an ontological engagement with

161

the conditions of life.21 The question is, of

course, what this new political community is, and
what aesthetic strategies could be employed to
construct it. Here one answer appears in the
creative possibilities of the general intellect or
mass intellectuality. These are evocative terms
in relation to Conceptual art, and perhaps open
the possibility of a re-reading of conceptual
strategies in relation to what Benjamin Buchloh
has called their aesthetic of Administration.
There are two possibilities opened by this line
of enquiry. On the one hand, and alongside
Conceptual arts dematerialisation of the commodity and its development of immaterial labour,
is its fascination for systems, for surveillance,
for documentation, not to mention its obsession
with filing systems and bureaucratic materials
and techniques. Sol LeWitt once said that an
artist functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the
results of his premise (quoted in Buchloh 140).
These common elements of conceptual practice
are either deployed in line with Deleuze and
Guattaris reading apolitically or, as we have
seen, in a negation of the market that nevertheless confirms it, and as such suggest a general
intellect operating entirely within the mechanisms of late capitalisms society of control.22
In this sense, Conceptual art could be understood
as the perfect aesthetic expression of the general
intellects capture within what Virno calls a
hypertrophic growth of administrative apparatuses (Grammar of the Multitude 67; original
emphasis).23
But Conceptual arts aesthetics of administration also suggests another possibility, one
that follows the often redundant, playful and
absurd uses it made of administrative practices.24
This would be Conceptual arts reappropriation
of administration, a reappropriation, as Antonio
Negri suggests, of the instruments of comprehension of social and productive cooperation
(Negri 221). This would be a generous reading of
conceptual practices that would see their fascination for the dematerialised object, immaterial
labour, and an aesthetics of administration as,
once more I quote Negri, an exercise of
individual labour posed within the perspective
of solidarity, within cooperation, in order to
administer social labour, in order to ensure an

against conceptual art

ever-richer reproduction of accumulated immaterial labour (221). It would seem, at least at
first glance, that this could be argued in relation
to conceptual strategies of de-skilling and its
implied solidarity with labour, and to the
developments emerging in the Art Workers
Collective, and in the feminist, anti-Vietnam,
and institutional critique of conceptual work in
the 1970s. Similarly, this is a reading that has
been extended to the more recent aesthetic
practices concerned with social creativity.
This reading would understand Negris solidarity to be the condition of possibility for a
contemporary aesthetics that produced political
resistance, and would affirm contrary to
Deleuze and Guattari Conceptual arts attempt
to move art away from the institution and towards
the social.25
In considering these administrative strategies of Conceptual art we are therefore confronted
with Deleuze and Guattaris divergence from
much of the Italian left. Deleuze and Guattaris
criticism that Conceptual art is too banal to be
political is based on their insistence that the
linguistic signifier is entirely complicit with
capitalist exploitation. The signifier and its
economy of representation guarantee capitalisms
logic of generalised equivalence, its politics of the
capitalisation of power, and its reproduction of
the organic subject. Therefore, any aesthetic
strategy that wishes to reappropriate the
administration of Empire must, in Deleuze
and Guattaris terms, transform the signifier of
information into a material and abstract sign.
Through abstraction the general intellect can
emerge as a non-subjective creative force capable
of rematerialising the sign in a living sensation.
For Deleuze and Guattari, art and politics imply
the same process, the construction of a community existing beyond the organism, a community
that breaks with the representational mechanisms
supporting both capitalism and art.26 Ironically
we are returned to Duchamp here, because in
discussing this at once political and aesthetic
process Deleuze and Guattari often refer to the
readymade. But this is a readymade with its
conceptual mechanism removed, a readymade
returned to Nature.27 For constructivism in
Deleuze and Guattaris terms is a vital and

material process by which the animal marks its

territory with found objects. Territorial marks
are readymades, they argue, a freeing
of matters of expression in the movement of
territoriality that is the base or ground of art.
(Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
316). We have arrived at the avant-garde moment
when art has become one with life, but both art
and life are animal, and the readymade functions
not to escape a living matter but to express it:
Take everything and make it a matter of
expression, Deleuze and Guattari tell us (ibid.
316). But we couldnt be further from Conceptual
art. The readymade for Deleuze and Guattari
takes art towards the animal, and not, as with
Duchamp, away from it.28 Finally, the readymade
is, for Deleuze and Guattari, a tool of construction rather than nomination; it is an affirmation
of the at once political and aesthetic task of
remaking the world, a task indiscernible from the
expression of the genetic and vital power of life.
What, then, does this mean for contemporary
artistic practice? I would like to suggest that there
are two possible interpretations of a contemporary
Deleuze and Guattarian aesthetics emerging from
my discussion. The first would be a rigorous
rejection of all contemporary practices that
continue to utilise conceptual strategies, with the
possible exception of an inorganic performance
art, and of video understood according to the
indications Deleuze gives in the Cinema books.
This would be an understanding of contemporary
art based upon a rejection of Duchamp, and as a
result would run the risk of being anachronistic,
inasmuch as Duchamp and his conceptual legacy
have so clearly been embraced by contemporary
art. Indeed, if we are to follow Deleuze and
Guattaris rejection of Conceptual art we will need
all of our imagination to find abstract and vital
aesthetic practices at work outside Deleuzes stoic
insistence on paintings experimentations with
colour, line and materials.
The second possible trajectory for a Deleuze
and Guattarian contemporary aesthetics would be
the becoming-animal of art. This strategy would
seek to express the abstract and yet material
vitality of life, and would evaporate art into what
we would call today aesthetic practices that
contest the territorialisations of late capitalist life.

162

zepke
This is perhaps the more rigorously constructivist
strategy, and is found in practices that are
indiscernibly aesthetic and political. I am thinking in particular of projects that are not
concerned with the question of what art is and
what it is not, but instead compose territorial
readymades with both aesthetic and political
dimensions into alternative social constituencies.
This is perhaps the Guattarian vision of an ethicoaesthetic paradigm, and here we find activists
rather than artists. The question remains,
however, whether these practices are either
truly aesthetic, and can produce radical sensations, or are not simply spectacular events taking
the place of real political actions.
Whatever contemporary directions we choose
to pursue, they must account for Deleuze and
Guattaris clear rejection of Conceptual art. This
remains a difficult provocation because it challenges our dominant understanding of what
constitutes our contemporaneity, while continuing to question political strategies of resistance
that do not launch a fundamental attack on the organism
and representation. It is no
doubt a measure of the necessity of these practices that they
seem so difficult to locate.

notes
1 Deleuze and Guattaris use of dematerialization refers to Lucy Lippards early connection
of the term to Conceptual art practices in
Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, The
Dematerialization of Art, in Art International
(Feb. 1968), and later in Lippards better known
Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object
from1966 to1972.
2 Steinberg argues that Duchamp is perhaps the
most vital source (85) for the flatbed plane, and
that in its primary example ^ the work of Robert
Rauschenberg ^ this surface stood for the mind
itself (88) and not least the banality of its processes and products (90). All these themes are
relevant to Deleuze and Guattaris rejection of
conceptual art.
3 These two receptions of Duchamps readymade
in Conceptual art, as well as Deleuze and
Guattaris objection to them, had already been

163

laid out in Benjamin Buchlohs seminal essay

Conceptual Art 1962^1969: From the Aesthetic
of Administration to the Critique of Institutions
in October 55 (winter 1990). Given that an earlier
version of Buchlohs essay had appeared in the catalogue to an important exhibition of Conceptual
art at the Musee dart moderne de la Ville in Paris
in 1989, it is not surprising that Deleuze and
Guattari appear so familiar with these issues in
What is Philosophy? This could also be the reason
for the fact that this attack on Duchampian strategies marks a departure from Deleuze and
Guattaris previously published remarks. Deleuze
had evoked Duchamps assisted readymade
L.H.O.O.Q. in the preface to Difference and Repetition
(xxi) as a forerunner of his own form of ventriloquised philosophy, and more significantly Guattari
had favourably discussed the Bottlerack in
Cartographies Schizoanalytiques (translated as
Ritournellos and Existential Affects in The
Guattari Reader) and quoted Duchamp in
Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (100 ^ 01)
in support of his ethico-aesthetic paradigm. For a
discussion of the problems with Guattaris use
of Duchamp see Eric Alliez, Rewriting
Postmodernity (Notes), and chapter 5 in my Art
as Abstract Machine. For a general overview of the
problems and positions in the intensely debated
field of Conceptual arts Duchamp reception, see
the Roundtable discussion Conceptual Art and
the Reception of Duchamp in October 70 (fall
1994).
4 For the artist, Kosuth writes,as an analyst, is
not directly concerned with the physical properties of things. He is concerned only with the way
(1) in which art is capable of conceptual growth
and (2) how his propositions are capable of logically following that growth (20). This is a very
clear echo of Ayer:For the philosopher, as an analyst, is not directly concerned with the physical
properties of things. He is concerned only with
the way in which we speak about them (Ayer 57).
5 Deleuze and Guattari argue that in scientific discourse enunciation remains external to the proposition because the latters object is a state of
affairs as referent, and the references that constitute truth values as its conditions (even if, for their
part, these conditions are internal to the object)
(What is Philosophy? 23). This is, in effect, the way
the concept operates in LeWitts work.
6 Guattari is attacking the postmodernists, a
designation traceable to the late 1960s, whose

against conceptual art

views are directly in keeping with the modernist tradition of structuralism, whose influence on the human sciences appears to have
been a carry-over from the worst aspects of
Anglo-American systematization.The secret
link that binds these various doctrines, I
believe, stems from a subterranean relationship ^ marked by reductionist conceptions,
and conveyed immediately after the war by
information theory and new cybernetic
research. (Guattari, The Postmodern
Impasse 111)
7 Information was such a widely used term
amongst conceptual artists that the major survey
show of Conceptual art held at the Museum of
Modern Art, New York in 1970 took that name.
8 Once more Deleuze and Guattari are quite precise: a thing, its photograph on the same scale and
in the same place, its dictionary definition (Whatis
Philosophy? 198).
9 Examples would be: art indiscernible from
the ordinary perceptions and affections of the
viewer ^ John Baldessaris The Back of All theTrucks
Passed While Driving from L.A. to Santa Barbara,
California, Sunday 20 January, 1963; art where
the concept is reduced to a proposition
stating an opinion ^ Cildo Meireles Insertions into
Ideological Circuits (1970); and art as a doxa confirming the generic subject of urban American social
life ^ On Kaweras Im Still Alive postcard project
begun in the late 1960s.
10 Interview with Seth Siegelaub, 17 Apr. 1969
(Alberro and Norvell 40). It is interesting to note
that at the other extreme, but for similar reasons,
Deleuze and Guattari also reject the phenomenological project for painting, which would attempt
to assimilate sensation to an original opinion or
Urdoxa. This would be to find in affects and percepts a priori materials that transcend the affections and perceptions of the lived (Deleuze and
Guattari,What is Philosophy? 178). This would summarise the necessity of art to the phenomenological account, as the operative element that
expressed a transcendental subject determining
experience in general by constructing sensations
as lived experience. This argument is fully developed by Deleuze in Francis Bacon: Logic of
Sensation, and finally means his rejection of a phenomenological flesh as a metaphor for incarnation
that retains a transcendental commitment. Flesh
as the developer (Deleuze and Guattari,What is

Philosophy? 183) of transcendental ideas remains

too pious (178) and will be replaced by Artauds
flesh of the Body without Organs (Deleuze,
Francis Bacon 34 ^35).
11 This is once more perfectly articulated by the
laconic Siegelaub: I mean art is obviously beginning to reach out into provinces we thought were
just, you know, lifes (Alberro and Norvell 41).
12 The exhibitions and articles in which arts relation to Systems theory and new technology were
explored are too many to list here. Worth mentioning is the exhibition curated by Jack Burnham,
one of the most intelligent proponents of systembased art, Software: Information Technology: Its
Meaning for the Arts, held at the Jewish
Museum, New York, in 1970. Burnham wrote
in the catalogue that the exhibition demonstrates
the control and communication technologies in
the hands of the artists. Interestingly, this statement is echoed in Guattaris affirmation of a strategic reappropriation of communications and data
processing technologies to produce, among other
things, a re-singularization of mechanically
mediated means of expression (Guattari, The
Postmodern Impasse 113). The question remains,
however, whether Conceptual arts reappropriation succeeded.
13 Conceptual artists found much in common
with Marshall McLuhan, the prophet of the information age, when he wrote in 1967: At the high
speeds of electric communication, purely visual
means of apprehending the world are no longer
possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or
effective. Beyond the visual, at least for the conceptual artists, lay the word, and through it art
as information was plugged into the new global
village (McLuhan 63).
14 Despite Conceptual arts clear rejection of
Greenbergs materialism and his emphasis on
vision, its relation to Greenbergs definition of
Modernism as a Kantian self-criticism is a more
complex one. It is commonly argued that Kosuths
Art as Idea as Idea marks the final conclusion of
the Modernist desire for aesthetic purity.
Similarly, Kosuths insistence on the artistic gesture, or concept, as the authorial basis of aesthetic
expression suggests a certain continuity with
Greenbergs theories. Deleuze and Guattaris relation to Greenberg and Frieds work is also ambiguous. On the one hand there is sometimes a tacit
acceptance of their terms (for example the final

164

zepke
footnote of the Smooth and the Striated chapter
in A Thousand Plateaus, which is to Fried), and a
disavowal of differences (Deleuzes claim that his
disagreement with Greenberg is merely an ambiguity over words (Deleuze, Francis Bacon 107)).
On the other there is a clearly irreconcilable difference over the Modernist dematerialisation of
sensation in vision, and the transcendental aesthetic Greenberg takes from Kant. For a more
detailed discussion of this problem see Zepke,
chapters 4 and 5.
15 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest a
political project in which being against becomes
the essential key to every active political position
in the world (Empire 211). As Paolo Virno writes:
The political action of the Exodus consists, therefore, in an engaged withdrawal, a withdrawal that
will found a new republic against the State (Virno,
Virtuosity and Revolution 197).
16 Weiner attempts to express class solidarity
with this piece, claiming that the reason it is
sprayed onto the floor is because that is how a
car-painter does it. From this point of view, spraying on the wall is an unnatural act. See the interview with Weiner in Alberro and Norvell (106).
17 This could be a hilariously extreme attitude.
Lawrence Weiner, for example, claimed that not
going outside to execute one of his pieces because
it was snowing would be a kind of expressionism.
See the interview with Weiner in Alberro and
Norvell (106).
18 For a useful account of the corporate embrace
of Conceptual art see Alberro (Conceptual Art and
the Politics of Publicity, chapter 1: Art, Advertising,
SignValue).
19 This is a reading of Conceptual art that is widespread in the literature, and emerged as early as
Lucy Lippards Postface to Six Years: The
Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to
1972 from 1973. While Buchloh writes that
Conceptual art mimed the operating logic of
late capitalism and its positivist instrumentality,
he argues that it did so with the aim of
liquidating even the last remnants of traditional aesthetic experience (Buchloh 142^ 43).
Alexander Alberro states more categorically that
the idea that the political economy of conceptual
art sought to eliminate the commodity status
of the art object, while highly provocative,
is mythical (Alberro 4).

165

20 Boris Groys has argued that Conceptual arts

embodiment of pure negativity was the completion and extreme radicalisation of the historical
avant-garde, and that this radicalisation was what
paradoxically pushed it into the arms of a late capitalist and post-revolutionary logic.Groys invokes
Hegels definition of post-revolutionary society as
a description of Conceptual art: the defining of
rational goals, procedures and strategies to its
members, and a demand for explanations, justifications and precise plans (Groys, The Mimesis of
Thinking 54).
21 As Guattari argues: Artistic assemblages will
have to organise themselves so as not to be delivered, bound hand and foot, to a financial market
(Chaosmosis 124).
22 Indeed Boris Groys has suggested, and here I
agree, that art documentation as an art form
[i.e., as it arose in relation to conceptual practices]
could only develop under the conditions of todays
biopolitical age, in which life itself has become
the object of technical and artistic intervention
(Art in the Age of Biopolitics 108).
23 Virno writes that in order for mass intellectuality to enter the political scene and destroy
what deserves to be destroyed, it cannot limit
itself to a series of refusals, but beginning with
itself it must exemplify positively through construction and experimentation what men and women
can do outside the capitalist relationship
(DoYou Remember Counterrevolution? 225).
24 Johanna Burton suggests that recourse to
systems enabled rather than denied access to the
rhizomatic, perpetually variable and vehemently
nonlinear (67).
25 The most interesting of these readings comes
from Howard Slater, who argues that Conceptual
art enables a rejection of the a priori identity of
art that, as it crosses the social field becomes
more and more distant from the art institution
until it materialises cultural relationships and
social relations that can be enacted upon as a
social object. This would be the condition for
gaining control of the administrative apparatus,
or, as Slater has it, of the means of expression
(Slater n.p.). Similarly Brian Holmes has argued
that the counter-globalisation movements innovative use of the Internet was a kind of autonomous,
do-it-yourself conceptualism that worked in perfect accord with Lawrence Weiners famous dictums, the work could be carried out by the initial

against conceptual art

authors of the ideas, realized by others, or not
done at all ^ something like a taste of planetary
exchange, where the art is totally free
(Holmes176).
26 In Empire Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
seem unable to produce any positive description
of the world beyond Empire. Their insistence on
being against as the fundamental political strategy compels them to argue that any positive constructions in fact defeat their purpose, for even
when they
manage to touch on the productive, ontological dimension of the problematic and the
resistances that arise there [. . .] we will still
not be in the position [. . .] to point to any
already existing and concrete elaboration of
a political alternative to Empire. And no such
effective blueprint will ever arise from a theoretical articulation such as ours. It will arise
only in practice. (399^ 400)
27 This would be a readymade in the spirit of
Deleuzes Duchampian suggestion of producing a
philosophically clean-shaven Marx (Deleuze,
Difference and Repetition xxi).
28 As Duchamp said: I believe that art is the only
kind of activity in which man, as man, shows himself to be a true individual capable of going beyond
the animal phase (137).

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Stephen Zepke
Kohlergasse 5-18
1180 Vienna
Austria
E-mail: eszed@hotmail.com