William Stewart

IHUM Writing Sample

Department of German

If I say so: administrative logics between the MFA and post-readymade conceptual art

“The era of Conceptual art was . . . a real free-for-all”, Lucy Lippard recalls in the 1997
foreword of her “biased history” of conceptual and dematerialized art from 1966 to 1972, Six

Years (1973).1 Reflecting on her first-hand experiences as a critic, Lippard describes conceptual
art as wildly democratic, countercultural, irreverent, post-Duchampian, and at heart an “escape

attempt” from institutional and ideological “cultural confinement”. The liberation-narrative of

this period is, however, not quite so straightforward. In his now-canonical 1990 essay,
“Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of

Institutions”, Benjamin Buchloh acknowledges the forms of rebellion that Lippard claims, even
if they often assume the less-than-flattering form of “petit-bourgeois anarchist radicality”.2
Ironically, though, Buchloh attributes these liberating forces to the application of “the rigorous
and relentless order of the vernacular of administration” on “artistic aspiration”.3 If the category
of conceptual art demarcates an escape from cultural confinement, it does so, Buchloh

demonstrates, through a coziness with the very ideological constraints it seeks to buck.

Buchloh’s study maps this dialectic between escaping cultural confinement and
repressive bureaucratic rigidity at the heart of the conceptual art movement. Looking at

representative figures like Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, Joseph Kosuth, and Robert Morris, he
identifies the distinguishing characteristic of their art as “an aesthetic of administrative and legal

organization and institutional validation”.4 Yet he concludes with the observation that

1
Lucy R Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York:
Praeger, 1973), vii.
2
Benjamin H D Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the
Critique of Institutions”, October 55 (Winter 1990): 137.
3
Ibid., 143.
4
Ibid., 119.

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conceptual art’s most significant development in style, representation, and aesthetic imaginary

occurred as it mimed “laws of positivist instrumentality and the logic of administration” in order

to expose the social institutions from which these emerge.5

Taken together, Buchloh’s and Lippard’s remarks open a whole new line of questioning.

What kind of a free-for-all can it actually be if these “wildly democratic” and “petit-bourgeois
anarchist” artists are all deploying bureaucratic instrumentality and managerial logic? And what

are the conditions under which these art subjects have internalized such an administrative

position? Who says art can be administrated? Indeed, Buchloh’s history of conceptual art leaves

undersurveyed the degree to which conceptual artists and their artworks alike are implicated in

the ideological apparatuses that they sought to critique, as well as the conceptual premises
necessary for this implication.

In light of that, this paper seeks, first, to broaden the account of an “aesthetic of
administration” by inverting the phrase and considering the conditions for the plausibility of an
administration of aesthetics. Specifically, it demonstrates that the nearness of aesthetics and
administration identified by Buchloh in conceptual art is not an outlier, being contemporaneous
with the establishment of managerial and administrative logics in another significant area of the

art world, namely MFA-granting art programs. Second, this paper seeks to situate conceptual art

and artists within a long history of document-based governmentality in order to show the extent
to which conceptual art-thinking not only aligns artists and artworks with a bureaucratic logic,

but even makes them dependent on it. Inasmuch as they are both art objects indebted to
Duchamp’s readymade, the conceptual artwork and the terminal art degree mime not only the

“cultural confinement” of Lippard’s six years, but in fact a much larger paradigm of document-
based governmentality.

5
Buchloh, 143.

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I. Duchamp’s legacy: art between aesthetics and administration

The key starting points for an analysis of conceptual art are Marcel Duchamp and the

readymade.6 As artist Joseph Kosuth proclaimed in his 1969 essay “Art after Philosophy”, “All art
(after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually.”7 Art in the

shadow of the readymade must contend perpetually with its foundation as an analytic or linguist
proposition—“this is a work of art”. Within this paradigm, status as an aesthetic entity (an

artwork, in other words) depends on a declaration by the artist, on an act of naming, on a fiat

that claims the artwork as an artwork. Kosuth articulates this point forcefully:

Works of art are analytic propositions . . . A work of art is a tautology in that it is a

presentation of the artist’s intention, that is, he is saying that that particular work of
art is art, which means, is a definition of art. Thus, that it is art is true a priori (which
is what Judd means when he states that “if someone calls it art, it’s art”).8
The remarks of both Kosuth and Judd emphasize the artist’s role in naming an intention, in
“saying that a particular work” is art, or “calling” something art, what Buchloh identifies
(skeptically) as a “willful artistic declaration”.9

Precisely this “willful declaration” is put on display in Robert Rauschenberg’s This is a

portrait of Iris Clert if I say so (1961; fig 1.). In this provocative work, Rauschenberg sends to Iris
Clert a telegram whose text declares the telegram itself to be a portrait of Clert, as long as he, the

artist, says so. Two sites of tension immediately present themselves: first, the telegram’s claim to
a status as portraiture, despite its utter lack of formal resemblance to any work in the long

history of this genre; and second, the dependence of this status as portrait on the condition of
Rauschenberg saying so. To the question, “is this a portrait of Iris Clert?”, the work is doubly

6
See here Lippard, ix. For a more thorough analysis of this point, see also Hal Foster, The Return of
the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) 99–124;
Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America”, October 3 (Spring 1977): 68–81;
Maurice Berger, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (New York: Harper and
Row, 1989); Julia Robinson, “From Abstraction to Model: George Brecht’s Events and the
Conceptual Turn in Art of the 1960s”, October 127 (Winter 2009): 77–108.
7
Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy” [1969], Art After Philosophy: Collected Writings, 1966–1990
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 18.
8
Kosuth, 20.
9
Buchloh, 126.

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ambiguous. Not only does the work leave to the viewer to decide whether an artistic declaration

trumps formal resemblance, that is, whether saying so makes a portrait; moreover, the work

gives no indication whether Rauschenberg did, in fact, say so.

In Iris Clert, Rauschenberg’s conditional-act-as-artwork clearly recalls the contradictions

of visual representation in surrealist René Magritte’s famous La trahison des images (1928–9;
fig. 2). While both works play on the inherent ambiguity of an index (“this” or “ceci”), there are

important distinctions to be made between them. Magritte’s work calls attention to an internal

contradiction between the painted statement and the painted pipe and thus the limits of

representation. The key to the statement in Les trahison des images is “ceci”: this is not a pipe,

because it does not do what a pipe does, namely allow itself to be smoked; rather, this is a
painting of a pipe, a representation of a pipe. But where Magritte puts pressure on the

limitations of symbolic semantics, Rauschenberg elevates an external tension between the

artistic declaration and the physical art object. Iris Clert skirts the troubling ambiguity of
Magritte (What does “this” refer to? The telegram? Clert’s address? The teletype?) by asserting
the primacy of the willful declaration. Here, the physical object has become a site at which the
artistic declaration is negotiated, conveyed, and communicated. It ultimately does not matter to

what “this” refers. The ambiguity between the profane telegram and the artistic work is resolved

in the artist’s arbitration of saying so.

Rauschenberg’s Iris Clert thus rehearses the propositional logic of Duchamp’s

readymade: if the artist calls this urinal is an artwork, then it is not (or not just) a urinal, but an
artwork. But it also reveals in a particularly clear way Kosuth’s claim that post-Duchampian art

only exists conceptually. The telegram’s status as portrait is purely conceptual, that is,
dependent on a declaration of the artist whose occurrence is plausible but which the work itself

Stewart 4
fig. 2. This Is a Portrait of Iris Clert If I Say So, Robert Rauschenberg, 1961

fig. 3. La trahison des images, René Magritte, 1928–9

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cannot affirm or definitively attest to. A better rehearsal of Lewitt’s claim that “the idea becomes

the machine that makes the art” is difficult to find.10

Perhaps more importantly, however, Iris Clert calls attention to the extent that the
Duchampian fiat is always complementarily legitimized by an external party or institution.

Either Rauschenberg has to say so (to someone) that the portrait is a portrait, or the concept of
his conditional declaration has to be acknowledged by an institutional authority as already being

art. Buchloh describes this dynamic clearly: “Beginning with the readymade, the work of art had

become the ultimate subject of a legal definition and the result of institutional validation . . .

constituted by linguistic as well as by specular conventions, by the institutional determination of

the object’s status as much as by the reading competence of the spectator”.11 The artwork’s status
as an artwork results from the dynamic between the artist as declaratory subject and whatever

source of legitimation (gallery, museum, spectator) to which the artist or artwork appeals. Thus,
the readymade (and, by extension, all art in a post-Duchampian tradition) is concerned
fundamentally with “the enunciative conditions of the art work from without” (i.e. externally),
as Hal Foster argues.12 In this paradigm, the artwork becomes a discursive site or “index”, to
borrow Rosalind Krauss’s formulation, “a matrix for a related set of ideas which connect to one

another”, a marker or trace of a cause, like footprints, medical symptoms, or shadows.13 And as a

discursive site, Julia Robinson notes, the materiality of the artwork is not “a vehicle of expression
but a cue to perception”, and the creative act is grounded not in any physical object, but

“temporally as an Event”.14 Consider Rauschenberg’s Iris Clert again. The event of the artist’s
“saying so” is a cue to perception, perception of not only the enunciative conditions of the art

work (i.e., its capacity to become a portrait), but also the matrix of authorities and discursive

10
Sol Lewitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”, Artforum 5:10 (Summer 1967): 79.
11
Buchloh, 117; 134.
12
Foster, 17–8.
13
“Notes on the Index”, 71.
14
Robinson, 103, 108.

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spaces in which Rauschenberg is legitimized as artist and his declaration is legitimized as art-

making.

To what matrix of legitimacy do the indices of conceptual art point? According to

Buchloh’s central thesis, conceptual art shifts away from “an aesthetic of industrial production

and consumption” and a desire to “annihilate” existing cultural conventions through an

insistence on “artistic anonymity” and the “demolition of authorship”, observable in Abstract

Expression, Minimalism, and Pop Art. Instead, it pursued vectors of spectacle, brand naming,

product identification, billboard textuality, and marketing campaigns in an effort to “purge

artistic production of the aspiration towards an affirmative collaboration with the forces of

industrial production and consumption”.15 Conceptual art aligned with the rationale of a
postwar managerial class, whose identity was structured through “administering labor and

production (rather than producing) and [through] the distribution of commodities”.16 In this
paradigm, conceptual art indexes less the material conditions of industrial modernity and rather
the social dynamics engaged by a bureaucrat and an administrator.
But while Buchloh’s reading points to this bureaucratic inflection at the heart of
conceptual art, it fails to interrogate it. For despite the analytical insight of this “aesthetic of

administration”, Buchloh never thinks to invert the phrase and ask if conceptual art isn’t also

premised upon an administration of aesthetics, that is, upon aesthetics being a legitimate object
of administration. What might that mean? Buchloh gives an important hint. In discussing the

shifts in relational dynamics between audience, object, and artist brought about by conceptual
art’s Duchampian neo-Dadaism, he identifies a key “programmatic redistribution of author/artist

function”, citing Sol LeWitt to describe the production of artworks as comparable to the
“performance of daily bureaucratic tasks”17: “The artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful

15
Buchloh, 119; 142. Italics mine.
16
Ibid., 128.
17
Ibid., 140.

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or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of his premise.”18 In

this statement, Buchloh finds evidence for the shift away from art’s interest in production and

distribution of art objects and toward instead art as a mode of administering labor and
production (exemplified best, perhaps, in the specific objects of Donald Judd, fabricated outside

of the studio and wholly uninterested in the process or conditions or their coming into being).
What Buchloh omits, however, is that this position implies a radical notion in the way an artist

imagines her relationship to the art work. In the paradigm of conceptual art, aesthetics is

conceived of as something that can be clerked, administered, and managed. Iris Clert provides a

clear example: status as artwork depends ultimately upon an act of management or clerking by

Rauschenberg—if he gives his approval, then the telegram becomes a portrait.

II. Duchamp goes to the academy: MFA as readymade

While narratives of Buchloh and others point to the emergence of post-industrial society
and its changing conditions of labor as a sufficient explanation for the emergence of this
phenomenon of managerial aesthetics, there are other, less abstract developments that support
the plausibility of this claim.19 One history in particular provides broader context for the

paradigm shift to aesthetic administration is that of art higher education in America, specifically

the establishment and institutionalization of BFA- and MFA-granting departments in the wake
of World War II.

An ethnography of the 20th-century American art schooling post-war—in particular the

one presented in Howard Singerman’s Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American

University—observes art education moving away from a reflection of pragmatic knowledge of

18
Sol LeWitt, “Serial Project #1, 1966”, Aspen Magazine, Ed. Brian O’Doherty, nos. 5-6 (1967): n. p.
19
Helen Molesworth’s essay “Work Ethic” is paradigmatic in this regard, in which she suggests that
the labor practices of artists shifted in conjunction with other labor practices across the global West.
Helen Molesworth, “Work Ethic”, Work Ethic, Ed. Helen Molesworth (University Park, PA: The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 25–52.

Stewart 8
craft, and toward the development of a consensus about the manner in which the designation

“artist” is a professionalizable one. As the century progresses, a degree in art no longer reflects

an artisinal competency, as more pragmatic models of art pedagogy in the tradition of the Ecole
des Beaux Artes (or even the Bauhaus) would dictate. Instead, it designates that the one who
holds such a degree is, by virtue of holding it, an artist. As Singerman writes, “the artist need not
demonstrate the traditional manual skills and techniques of representation but instead must

possess certain kinds of knowledge and occupy a certain position.”20 While Singerman’s mapping

of this conceptual shift toward an increased administration of one’s Künstlersein is complex,21

one explanation is central: art departments at American universities experienced rapid

expansion and growth in the 1940s and 50s, catalyzed in part by the influx of students through
the G. I. Bill. In order to establish their legitimacy qua department, these departments began to

align art education with the rapid bureaucratization and corporatization of the American
university at this time.22 The academic training of artists, the conception of art as a form of
research, and the fashioning of art criticism as a science that developed during the middle of the
20th century all signal the influence of specialization, administration, and professionalization on
the manner in which the university understood the “artist” as a producer of art “knowledge”.23

This growing notion of the professionalized artist was registered by critics and educators

already in the 1950s. In his 1959 essay “Everyman a Professional”, art critic and art educator
Harold Rosenberg articulates just this, equating the modern artist with the ad man and the

lawyer, because all three find their identities in their professional status: “Having no identity
other than the one he creates for himself through his métier, he is compelled to regard the rank

20
Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 173.
21
See Singerman, chapters 1–3.
22
Singerman, 128ff. “The G. I. Bill funneled money into educational settings, accompanied by the
demand that they professionalize and accredit themselves and credential their graduates . . . The
formalization of art training and the prospect of professionalism in the university represented by
students returning on the G. I. Bill combined with the critical visibility of an emergent abstract
expressionism to integrate the university with an enlarged professional art world in New York.”
23
Singerman, 156

Stewart 9
of his profession, and of himself in it, as the final measure of his existence.”24 Rosenberg’s

position is echoed by Allan Kaprow, who in 1964 describes the task of the artist in decidedly

managerial and administrative terms, “escorting” (Singerman) his or her artworks to new
audiences—“[the artist’s] job is to place at the disposal of a receptive audience the new thoughts,

new works, the new stances even, which will enable his work to be better understood.”25
Moreover, by the end of the 70s, the parallels between corporate professionalism and the

experience of the artist (at least the artist-educator) within the university had become so obvious

as to be articulated explicitly. In her 1978 study of the California Institute of the Arts, Judith

Adler notes the irony in the fact that “people who may have been drawn to the arts in the first

place because, like Marcel Duchamp, they ‘did not want to go to the office,’ now squirm slightly
in their university offices.”26 But this is equally applicable to art students, as well. Whatever

interest in bohemian freedom and countercultural values might drive a person to pursue training
in art, at an institution like 1970s CalArts, those desires would be met, Adler writes, with “the
culture and imperatives of a bureaucratic work organization with its stress on certified and
universalistic credentials, routinized procedure, formally designated domains of authority and
expertise, the subordination of person to office, and the use of formal and hierarchically

significant titles.”27

Importantly, examining the climate of American art departments in the wake of World
War II also helps integrate into this narrative of aesthetic administration an art movement that is

otherwise left out, if one begins with Duchamp’s readymade and springs forward to conceptual
art. By the 1950s, a significant number of artists associated with Abstract Expressionism held

positions as lectures, instructors, chairs, or visiting artists at American universities—Jackson

24
Harold Rosenberg, “Everyman a Professional”, The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon
Press, 1959), 63.
25
Allan Kaprow, “Should the Artist Become a Man of the World”, Art News 63, no. 6 (October
1964): 58.
26
Judith Adler, Artists in Offices (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1979), 17.
27
Adler, 17.

Stewart 10
Pollock, Robert Motherwell, William de Kooning, Philip Guston, Ad Reinhardt, Marc Rothko.

The presence of these figures proved to be a major draw for students. Rothko would complain in

1955 that his students at the University of Colorado at Boulder “want me to teach them how to
paint abstract expressionism”, and William Seitz’s 1955 Princeton dissertation on Abstract

Expressionism would note the striking degree of influence the movement was having on nearly
all painting produced from college and university art departments.28 The dominant presence of

Abstract Expressionism within art departments following the war is a significant chapter in the

history of art professionalization and bureaucratization, however, due to the cultural or

ideological shift that it bears on the notion of the artist. For Abstract Expressionism’s early

reception emphasized the way in which it insists on a productive and dynamic relationship
between the artwork and the identity of the artist. Rosenberg famously noted in his 1952 essay

“The American Action Painters” that “a painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography
of the artist”, indicating the way that art creates or writes the artist as much as the other way
around.29 In 1958, he makes this even more explicit, writing that action painting “has to do with
self-creation or self-definition or self-transcendence; but this dissociates it from self-expression,
which assumes the acceptance of the ego as it is.”30 In this logic, Robert Motherwell’s dictum

that “every artist’s problem is to invent himself” can be unpacked as a kind of tautology; 31 for if

self-invention is bound up with the performative act of producing an artwork, then he might as
well have said “every artist’s problem is to make art”.

But as the act of “making art” moves toward a logic of performative enunciation, all the
while matched by an ever-increasing environment of administration and bureaucratization

28
Singerman, 127–8. See also William C. Seitz, “Abstract-Expressionist Painting in America: An
Interpretation Based on the Work and Thoughts of Six Key Figures,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton
University, 1955.
29
Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters” in The Tradition of the New (New York:
Horizon Press, 1959), 27.
30
Ibid., 28.
31
Robert Motherwell, The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, Ed. Stephanie Terenzio (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 55.

Stewart 11
within the post-war American university, a conceptual reciprocity between the notions of

“making art” and “becoming an artist” reveals itself. In other words, the questions of

professionalism shaping theories of art education and the status of its degrees parallel the
questions about art itself that accompanied the re-emergence of the readymade in conceptual

art. This connection relies in part upon twentieth-century art’s “linguistic turn”, whose roots are
found in both Cubism and Marcel Duchamp, but which stretches forward to the structuralist

analyses that dominate so much of intellectual art discourse during the latter half of the 20th

century.32 Adler articulates just this when she pins the affinity between the university and the

“academic” nature of conceptual art on language, on the discursive practices involved in the

“speculation about art” undertaken by both.33 Further, Mercedes Matter’s 1963 claim that “the
art school becomes ready made for the Ready Made” is parsed by Singerman as deriving first

from the fact that “language was the defining attribute of the university” and second that “the
readymade is the work that must be talked into existence”.34 Singerman pushes this logic to its
inevitable conclusion, establishing a concrete link between methods of university art pedagogy
and the logic of conceptual art: “The MFA makes artists in the same way the artist makes art in
the image of the readymade, as a matter of linguistic convention, according to a legal contract—

or approaching one—and certainly within an institutional discourse.”35 The understanding of

the MFA that develops in the decades following the Second World War parallels the
understanding of the art object within conceptual art: a declaratory, performative enunciation

that indexes, on the one hand, the degree-holding artist and, on the other, the educational
institution that has acknowledged her, through the degree, as an artist.

32
Buchloh, 107; Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977),
4–5; 261.
33
Singerman, 166.
34
Mercedes Matter, “What’s Wrong with U.S. Art Schools?”, Art News 62, no. 5 (September 1963):
41; Singerman, 155; 165.
35
Ibid., 174.

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 Placing Buchloh’s reading of conceptual art in the 1960s and 70s against the history of

art education in America during the decades immediately preceding that period thus locates his

thesis of an aesthetics of administration within a much larger discourse on administration and

aesthetics that involves not just the administration of works of art, but also artists themselves.

Thus, the pattern of professionalization exhibited by increasingly formalized art departments,

one in which both degree-holding students and degree-conferring educators are implicated,

extends beyond the confines of academia and appears within the broader art world of galleries

and museums. Or perhaps it works the other way around, considering Raymond Parker’s cavalier

(and cynical) claim in 1953 that “the art-world can be understood and taught as a subject.”36

Whatever the direction of influence, artworks and artistic identities at this time both exhibit a
logic in which status as “art” and as “artist” are gained through practices of administration,

legalistic logic, and enunciative performance.

With this narrative, then, a precedent for a literal administration of aesthetics can be
established, a conceit that the aesthetic object like the artist herself comes about through
management of legalistic definitions and declarations. LeWitt’s artist-as-functionary-clerk must
be rewritten slightly: it isn’t that he does not attempt to produce something of “aesthetic value”,

but rather that his clerking is both productive of and itself a kind of “beautiful and mysterious

object”. Administration has become artistic. It’s a portrait if the artist says so; it’s an artist if the
diploma says so. This troubles Buchloh’s conclusion somewhat, when he cites Daniel Buren and

Hans Haacke as examples of artists whose devotion to “the rigorous and relentless order of the
vernacular of administration” allowed their work, ultimately, to take on an institutional-critical

character and expose those places where administrative and instrumental logic arise. There is a
one-sidedness when Buchloh’s observes that “these institutions, which determine the conditions

of cultural consumption, are the very ones in which artistic production is transformed into a tool

36
Raymond Parker, “Student, Teacher, Artist”, College Art Journal 13, no. 1 (fall 1953): 29.

Stewart 13
of ideological control and cultural legitimation”.37 Instead, within the paradigm of the neo-

Duchampian readymade as plotted here, the artist herself is always already an apparatus of

“ideological control and cultural legitimation”. She is, by virtue or dint of the “administration”
of her work, herself an institution managing the conditions in which her cultural contribution

can be consumed.

III. Goethe did it first: aesthetic self-administration within document-based governmentality

Expanding Buchloh’s “aesthetics of administration” in order to identify the way that

practices of administration themselves become constitutive of aesthetic claims reveals a pattern

in which artists engage in bureaucratic and administrative forms not only to produce artworks,
but also for the purposes of self-fashioning and self-presentation as artists. However, the

infiltration of a conceptual framework of administration into discussions of aesthetics, art

education, and artistic professionalization in the 20th century offers an important chance to
situate these shifts within a cultural history of longue durée, namely that of the development of
governmentality and the attendant establishment of a document culture upon which that form
of sovereignty rests. Indeed, it is worthwhile to divert the conversation momentarily to this pre-

history.

In his lectures at the College de France at the beginning of 1978, Michel Foucaul offered
“governmentality” as a concept to explain the qualitative changes in modes of government in

Europe across the 13th through 18th centuries. The fundamental dilemma facing sovereigns, so
Foucault argues, was the inability to tune the “administrative apparatus of the territorial

monarchies” in a way proper to the diversity and complexity of its subjects. This would be
overcome with the development of the notion of the “population” and, with it, the possibility for

37
Buchloh, 143.

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establishing a science of the state, that is, statistics.38 Governmentality, so Foucault lectures, is

concerned with just this expansion of “the threshold of description” of “ordinary individuality”;39

moreover, what is of interest is not ordinary individuals as mere bodies, but as the “things” of
government, “men in their relationships with things like customs, habits, ways of acting and

thinking . . . men in their relationships with things like accidents, misfortunes, famine,
epidemics, and death.”40 Governmentality aims to know subjects as they appear within complex

dynamics and, thus, as they know themselves—that is, through their interactions, transactions,

and reactions. To that end, it invents and instates new forms of subject-writing so that, from the

16th century onward, government consists in “manipulating, maintaining, distributing, and re-

establishing relations of force . . . In other words, the art of government is deployed in a field of
relations of forces.”41

This trend toward administration and management of relations of forces cannot occur,
however, without the development and institution of specific writing technologies of
documentation, files, and paperwork. As Cornelia Vismann’s Akten (Files), Ben Kafka’s The
Demon of Writing, and Marcus Krajewski’s Paper Machines (Zettelwirtschaft) have in recent
years all established, governmentality’s drive to make legible, grasp, and control the increasingly

abstract “things” of government produces a reliance on bureaucratic techniques of

documentation.42 In this process, the things of government increasingly become the things of

38
Michel Foucault, “Lecture Four: 1 February 1978”, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the
College de France, 1977–78, Ed. Michael Senellart, Trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), 100–101ff.
39
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [1975], Trans., Alan Sheridan
(London: Penguin Books, 1995), 191.
40
“Lecture Four: 1 February 1978”, 96.
41
Michel Foucault, “Lecture Twelve: 29 March 1978”, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at
the College de France, 1977–78, Ed. Michael Senellart, Trans. Graham Burchell (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 312.
42
Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (New York: Zone Books,
2012); Marcus Krajewski, Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548–1929 [2002], Trans.
Peter Krapp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Cornelia Vismann, Files: Law and Media
Technology [2000], Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

Stewart 15
those document-based bureaucratic techniques. A feedback loop emerges as paper begins to talk

to paper, inevitable producing more paper in the process.

Vismann keys in on two results of this alignment of governmentality with document-

based bureaucracy. First, as they become elevated to objects of scientific investigation and

manipulation, state documents themselves become gestures of power. They vouch, so Vismann
argues, for authenticity, declaring and preserving information rather than transmitting it. They

denote the legal real, however the real might be constituted.43 Second, as subjecthood becomes

more and more reducible to information, it becomes more and more synonymous with that

information. This applies equally to individuals as it does to states. If governmentality dictates

that states render their subjects legible through these practices of bureaucracy and
administration, then the administrative state, itself produced by bureaucratic techniques,

becomes legible as document. State archives constitute the sovereignty as much as the sovereign,
and there is great deliberation and legislation within the bureaucratic state over what paperwork
can be made public and which must remain secret.44
The relationship brokered between the document and the subject rests at the crux of
administrative bureaucracy. Document culture creates and supports a symbolic or synecdochal

logic, in which bureaucratic assertions become objective reality and the document is the

individual (and the state). Interestingly, Vismann’s narrative exhibits a striking formal parallel
with the history of the MFA charted above, in which a “linguistic turn” produces the conditions

of possibility for an enunciative, performative paradigm. One of the primary events in German
bureaucratization of governmentality was the development in the 18th century of a literal science

of administrative control, Polizeywissenschaften, to be taught to aspiring civil servants and

bureaucrats at university. 45 However, nearly a century later, in 1815, Polizeywissenschaft was no

43
Vismann, 72–3.
44
Ibid., 112–13.
45
Ibid., 108. See also Johann Jakob Moser, Entwurf zu einer Staats- und Canzley Academie
(Hanau, 1749), 7.

Stewart 16
longer a required course of study at Prussian universities, as it was assumed that techniques of

filing, compiling, and archiving—clerking tasks, in other words—were skills that students

already possessed. As Vismann chronicles, the steady rise of literacy (ultimately enforced by law,
following the 1812 Prussian school reform) coupled with the normalization and ubiquity of

bureaucratic processes of Staatspraxis (the practice of statehood) served to integrate the

principles of these practices into everyday life. As a result, she writes, within these modes of

governmentality, a subject’s identity, even for him- or herself, is produced through forms of self-

administration, that is by “producing feedback with their own actions” through records and

notations of any and all forms. “In record-keeping nations like Prussia, where every citizen was

his own civil servant, public and private records became indistinguishable. They both amounted
to files compiled by the “administration of the interior” or, literally, the ministry of the

interior.”46 Thus a specific linguistic turn—here, an integration of bureaucratic literacy into

everyday life—makes possible the administration and production of a subject position, in a way
strikingly reminiscent of how Buchloh connects the linguistic turn to art logic after Duchamp
and Adler connects the MFA to the university’s comfort with semiotics and structuralism.
The compatibility of these administrative logics with aesthetic (or artist) logics is

captured by Vismann’s case study on the extent of such self-administration’s penetration into

artistic biography: the peculiar archive of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Fully inculcated in and
a master of this culture of self-administration, Goethe devoted the last years of his life to

organizing and curating which files would be received by posterity. Here, archiving becomes a
practice both egotistical and aesthetic, aimed at facilitating his own establishment within the

canon of literary genius. With instructions left for posthumous publication of later editions, the
author’s files remain in the service of his subjecthood, but they exhibit a kind of auto-poiesis,

writing themselves independently of and after the life of their administrator. The well-ordered

46
Vismann, 112–13.

Stewart 17
archive “programs future readers, ensuring that the literary achievement will be acknowledged

on its own grounds.”47 As Vismann writes, an active life, the vita activa, is tantamount to

curating an orderly archive, whose structure combats a “melancholic” chaos that, Goethe
remarks, otherwise “can only be used by myself”.48 In the last years of his life, this titanic

Teutonic writer takes on the role of secretary to his own work, to such an extent, in fact, that
five years before his death, fellow author Ernst Robert Curtius would pen an essay titled “Goethe

as Administrator” (Goethes Aktenführung).49 Thus, it isn’t just Sol LeWitt who “functions as a

clerk cataloguing the results of his premise”, but also Goethe, some two centuries before:

“Goethe adopted the administrative techniques of a chancery clerk to provide a foundation for

the author function”.50 Goethe offers, then, a paragon of the administration of aesthetics, as he
establishes a tradition of deploying the logic of bureaucratic systems to control and regulate

artistic status. And this extends beyond aesthetic objects to the artist’s subject position itself.
Indeed, the example of Goethe recalls Bernhard Siegert’s description of the degree to which
bureaucratic writing practices are, at the same time, biographical writing practices: “only when
life has proved to be a repetition of the life contained in documents can it turn into legitimate
life. Whatever life may be, it is only in and as writing.”51 In his last years, Goethe had begun to

deal in indexes, his life subject to the priority of the biographical records written into his

archive. As Curtius concludes, “Goethe has long since ceased to merely administer affairs of
state. He administers his own existence.”52 Under the long shadow of bureaucratic

47
Ibid., 114.
48
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Werke, second divison, vol. 41.2 (Weimar: Herausgegeben
im Auftrage der Grossherzogin Sophie von Sachsen, 1903), 400.
49
Ernst Robert Curtius, “Goethe as Administrator”, Essays on European Literature, Trans. Michael
Kowal (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973).
50
Vismann, 117.
51
Bernhard Siegert, “Pasajeros a Indias: Registers and Biographical Writings as Cultural Techniques
of Subject Constitution (Spain, Sixteenth Century)”, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and
Other Articulations of the Real, Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2015), 87.
52
Curtius, 68.

Stewart 18
administration, everything becomes the subject of documented legitimacy: possessions,

creations, and individuals alike.

IV. If I don’t say so: (anti-)aesthetic bureaucracy and taking back the willful declaration

Not surprisingly then, this tendency toward documented legitimacy is on blatant display
in much of the post-readymade and conceptual aesthetic regimes of the 20th century outlined

above. One must not look far for clear illustrations of artists’ awareness of this documentary

legalism, and descriptions like “legal object” and “document of administrative technique” often

apply very literally and superficially to artworks of the 20th century. Predictably, Duchamp

serves as a model here. In 1944, the Frenchman, himself the son of a notary,53 hired a notary to
authenticate his famous 1919 work, L.H.O.O.Q., certifying that it was “the original ‘ready-made’

L.H.O.O.Q. Paris 1919”.54 While certainly in line with the kind of institutional irreverence to
which Duchamp subscribed across his career, this return to L.H.O.O.Q. thirty-five years after its
original conception admits, not trivially, the artwork as an entity whose status as artwork can be
the object of bureaucratic and legalistic control. Appealing to the authority of the notary re-
emphasizes the fundamental conceptual shift achieved by the readymade, away from a notion of

art grounded in visual literacy or skill with materials and toward one fixated on legal legitimacy

and performative authority.55

Appropriately, conceptual art of the post-war generation pushes the Duchampian logic to

its extreme. In 1963, Robert Morris inverted Duchamp’s example of the notary public, not to
declare an entity to be an artwork, but just the opposite, to void it of all current and future

53
Pierre Cabane, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. R. Padgett (New York: A Da Capo Press,
1987), 103.
54
Buchloh, 118–19.
55
As Buchloh notes, by the early 1960s, artists like Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni quickly picked
up this legalistic understanding of artworks, notably issuing certificates that named individuals
(or partial individuals) as permanent works of art (Manzoni) or areas of space as zones of
pictorial sensibility (Klein). Buchloh, 119.

Stewart 19
aesthetic status. Morris had produced for the architect Philip Johnson a work called Litanies, a
series of twenty-seven keys, on each of which had been aptly inscribed a word from a translated

quote of Duchamp’s. But when Johnson failed to pay Morris for the work, the artist created a

second piece, titled Statement of Esthetic Withdrawal (fig. 4). This artwork consists of a
diagrammatic rendering of Litanies alongside a framed certificate signed by the artist and

notarized. The certificate reads: “The undersigned, ROBERT MORRIS, being the maker of the
metal construction entitled LITANIES, described in the annexed Exhibit A, hereby withdraws

from said construction all aesthetic quality and content and declares that from the date hereof

said construction has no such quality and content (signed and dated, November 15, 1963).”56
Morris’s Withdrawal tests the invertability of the aesthetic logic observable in Rauschenberg’s
Iris Clert: if it is portrait by Rauschenberg if Rauschenberg says so, can an artwork by Morris
cease to be an artwork if Morris says so? And if Duchamp’s notarization ensures the authenticity

fig. 4. Statement of Esthetic Withdrawal, Robert Morris, 1963

56
Quoted in Arthur Shimamura, Experiencing Art: In the Brain of the Beholder (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 247.

Stewart 20
of L.H.O.O.Q. as readymade, can Morris’s notarization render the key ring inauthentic as

readymade? If Morris doesn’t say so, is it then simply a set of keys? Not irrelevant is the fact that

Morris is motivated to produce Withdrawal on account of a breach of contractual logic, namely

Johnson failing to pay Morris. Withdrawal thus indexes, in part, the institution of the art market,

which ultimately confirms and realizes the monetary value of Litanies at auction, a value to
which Morris, unpaid, has no claim. In effect, the ultimate test of Morris’s Withdrawal would be

Johnson’s attempt to sell the keyring as a Morris artwork, indicating an important (if bracketed

in this discussion) terminus of a work’s claim to status as artwork in 1963.

But money aside, if Iris Clert hadn’t made Kosuth’s claim that art exists only as concept

clear enough, then Morris’s Withdrawal, insofar as it has the status of an artwork, renders the
point unambiguous. As a work, Withdrawal claims that the concept of an artist’s statement

about an aesthetic quality, whether positive or negative, is itself an artwork. Crucially, the
“concept” is given form here as a thing of government, a document of governmentality and
bureaucratic control. Morris’s creative power as artist is derived from his being a clerk, an
administrator, a document writer. So while Buchloh brings up the examples of both Duchamp’s
and Morris’s use of the notary, his analysis of these works as demonstrating an “aesthetic of

linguistic conventions and legalistic arrangements” is insufficient inasmuch as it overlooks how

these works claim that aesthetic quality itself can be administered, legalized, or rendered null
and void. These works by Duchamp and Morris are not merely examples of an aesthetics of

administration, but rather an administration of aesthetics, a rendering the artwork

administrable. Just like every other entity legible within bureaucratic society, it is an object of

governmentality.
Thus, this compact history bureaucratic writing techniques and document culture

identifies a paradigm that underlies the conditions of possibility for both the aesthetics of

administration and the administration of aesthetics evident in post-readymade art and

discussions of art-professionalization in the 20th century. In its own logic of declaration,

Stewart 21
nominalization, and distinction, art across the century again and again manifests a deep

internalization of bureaucratic thinking, in which discursive practices and administrative

techniques not only instantiate and re-instantiate categories (like “artwork” or even “artist”), but
also allow those categories to be checked, delimited, and proofed. Art works in the tradition of

the readymade most directly rely on this logic of bureaucracy and an administrating institution
for their validity. As Singerman and Krauss both explain, the particular aesthetic status of a

readymade is gained “only inside the institutions and discourses that constitute what is

abbreviated as the art world”.57 Through its participation in bureaucratic logic, art discourse

bestowed on the post-Duchampian artwork (qua readymade) the status of a (quasi-)legal object.

In The Demon of Writing, Kafka quotes Pierre Marc de Biasi’s characterization of “paper
as the ‘fragile support of the essential,’ but we might do better to think of it as the essential

support of the fragile: letters and numbers, but also needs and wants.”58 These examples from
Duchamp, Rauschenberg, and Morris show that, within the paradigm of 20th-century
bureaucratic society, de Biasi’s list of the “fragile” can also be augmented with “the aesthetic”
and the “work of art”. Nowhere does this become more visible than in the Conceptual Art of the
1960s and 70s and its dependence upon paperwork qua administration for the production of

aesthetic objects and even artists themselves. Indeed, what Max Weber had observed already in

1921, that “the reduction of modern office management to rules is deeply embedded in its very
nature”, is internalized and rehearsed in the aesthetic rules and dicta of Sol Lewitt’s “Sentences

on Conceptual Art” or in the concurrently developing administrative and professional

functionality of the MFA, in which programs so many in the Conceptual Art generation

studied.59

57
Singerman, 166.
58
Kafka, 118.
59
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and
Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), 958.

Stewart 22
 While Buchloh argues that Conceptual Art purged embodied experience, memory, and

“all residues of representation and style, of individuality and skill” from artworks, ultimately

devolving into a farce of Adorno’s notion of the “totally administered world”, 60 his screed fails to
note the way that individual arbitrary poetic agency has remained stubbornly and resiliently

indebted to bureaucracy. And indeed, this dynamic is an old one. In his account of the
administration of biography through documentation in sixteenth-century colonial Spain, Siegert

examines a feedback loop of legitimization, in which each act of bureaucratic legitimation must

be validated by the signature or stamp of yet another bureaucrat. This potentially infinite

regression is, however, halted by the imposition, at some level of bureaucracy, of an arbitrary act

guaranteeing the legitimacy of the document, noted on the document by the phrase es
bastante—that’s enough.61 The bureaucratic logic in the art of the 20th century is caught up
precisely in negotiating and renegotiating the locus of authority from which this arbitration may
come. Always at stake is the power to arbitrate through administration: who is allowed to say es
bastante? Artist? Institution? University? Indeed, whether in regard to status as artwork or as
artist, the post-Duchamp art world is consistently preoccupied with just where and under what
circumstances this bureaucratic es bastante can be declared.

60
Buchloh, 143.
61
Siegert, 94–6.

Stewart 23
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