Op Losse Schroeven: Situaties en Cryptostructuren

Op Losse Schroeven : situaties en cryptostructuren
15 Mars - 27 Avril 1969

Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Curateur : Wim Beeren
Artistes exposéxs : Giovanni Anselmo, Ben d’Armagnac, Boezem, Bill Bolinger, Michael Buthe, Pier Paolo
Calzolari, Gerrit Dekker, Jan Dibbets, Ger van Elk, Pieter Engels, Barry Flanagan, Berhard Höke, Paolo
Icaro, Immo Jalass, Olle Kaks, Hans Koetsier, Roelof Louw, Bruce McLean, Mario en Marisa Merz, Bruce
Nauman, Panamerenko, Emilio Prini, Bob Ryman, Gianni Emilio Simonetti, Frank Viner, Lawrence
Weiner, Gilberto Zorio
Op Losse Schroeven, exposition marquante de 1969, introduit publiquement l’art conceptuel

des années 1960 en réunissant arte povera, anti-form, art conceptuel, land art, tout en défiant ces
catégories et en introduisant de nouvelles approches curatoriales. Avec d’autres, cette exposition
historique a façonné la manière dont l’art contemporain est vécu, expérimenté, produit et discuté.
Pour Wim Beeren, curateur de l’exposition, il s’agit à la fois de découvrir toutes ces
nouvelles formes d'art et de comprendre ce qui les relie. Le titre Op Losse Schroeven offre une
description de l’unité comme tremblante et incertaine. « L'effet de nouveauté des œuvres fait
momentanément tomber l'opacité du code symbolique »1 et montre le rôle actif que l'art joue dans
ce processus, le changement et le contraste lui étant des principes inhérents. Cette exposition
s’inscrit alors comme une forme de discussion avec le contexte qui créé l’opportunité d’un nouveau
tout.
Op Losse Schroeven reflète l'esprit d'expérimentation qui anime les œuvres et fait une
critique institutionnelle, en présentant, entre autres, des performances éphémères et des
interventions conceptuelles hors des murs du musée. Les artistes recherchent la collusion/collision
du public avec l’art. De ce fait, de nombreuses œuvres exposées dans Op Losse Schroeven sont
sujettes à des changements continus. Ces œuvres n’existent que par leur brièveté et se construisent
par l’interaction avec les spectateurices qui les pénètrent.
Op Losse Schroeven reste et restera insaisissable.
1 Millet, Catherine, (2013), L’art contemporain (French Edition), Flammarion, p. 40.

Tracing 'Op L - -
osse Sch
-Steven ten Th""
•Je roeven (S·t
, uat·• 0 ns 968 b c his gallery in New York, refcrring co an
and Cryp
tost c,br11d'! 1 co John '\1/de .er ~ions' chat chey discussed 'lasc summer'. He
r11ctu 1 •' wrt 1' 5 n s,cua h 1 ' (4585)
r,1)• 0,,ren.
J of •obje':cs a k of [Edward] Kien o .,_ .
The Lfolio wrng
'O · presenrs
P osse Schroev , a chrono! ibir1on det-srte -wor
extensively o h en from an ini . ~gy that eih 'a JYIO
,,qoesrsb J968 . h J r,lid«l "'"'" w B,mn, ,sking w b, k,p,
additional co:r;i; a:chives of thetJ~~ idea to a folie~ the de
B;1,< g,Jl"i" M>' E'.;;.ibidon' ('Objcl<,<n Ausmllung') ,h,, h, bas h~,d
,h, ,venu d,scr;b,;;','':, from individ:~J;j\Mus,~~•. '>hib~'.'">•,.,
g1ven in square bra k
ere dates are s s w o Were _in Arnst on. lt dr of GerJTla;d f an •ObJehcc- colleccor involved with Galerie Mickery. (4585)
:Si,~: 7s"i~~:·.:tt::::d::Jfive~"~:v:~
folder in the a h. c ers. The numb u~gested rath d1recrJy . erdarn, ~"'•
~::,:-'hst~eh~~:rel:evanr
k~~:~indicd:t~~;arc;:th~
inforJTI 0 frits 13ec c, a
about froJTI
. spans seven are z6]"" J96 d wd"' G«m•no Cdan< ,,,ponds w Bw,n's "•"'" fo,
8
lAf/d uc fi Id ocu e JcaJian curacor :;rce povera works. (4583)
,, .' - mnd ,f/967] , '"• ._:•oo photographs o
W,m B««n hand . s,, 6A•t"' J968 ,o B«"n ,sking if h, i• going w l"ly ,nd suggosdng
unity of the arrwo~J~es ~n undated a Van ~lk wnces visit to Gil~rdi, whose address he provides. (4583)
work are gath d Js d1srupred' Ap. ge of notes . h
'Ob · ere aga· . . mst d wu th he m1ght pay a
'C Jebc_r/ Combined' i~sWt ldist of categori~- a'nC llbrief descripet_heading 'th•
om in , 'O . , in ow' '" . o ag , ' . ions f '
Th . ", bJm' 'E . • "'"mbl, , ', ObJ«ûR " ,h~ [Autumn "''"'
19681of uav<l ;, d,,wn up. B«,en sch<du" 1 ,n,enngs b<rN""
e arnsts mem · , nv1ronmenr' ' ge and 'Ob· eadyrnad ,
Dai/, Marcel Du ihoned represent the cla' J:falappening' and c Jelclt/Sculpture,'
. . C amp d SSJC una ·s· e,
A ,;i;• ·
oaobct wiID Du,ro ,nis,s Mrucinus Boa<'", van Elk ,nd J,n Dibhm,
;,::, ; g '° visi< England [rom 29 ,o 31 O,wb«, ,h, US ,pp,oxima«ly
"'""'""'d ,o <"h er matenal
"' ManonRay.'Funk
Ank M ~car,
,vam-gwl,, indu[ """ioo'
a collea e a mg Salvador 0 0 Novcmbct ,nd G«m•nY on o,dy Dw,mb«. (4588)
'"11
R,ffming back on . An. (4588) gu nh,S«dclijl, 1
ideas that wouJd th1s period in I 99 JoJi,n
25 October Lud•no Piswi """" ,o Bwen, sonding pho,og,aphs of worl<
1968
,k,la
fairly tradition I evemually lead to '05, Beeren indicated th by ruc,i,u Giulio P,olini ,nd Lud,no F,bro, " ,h, """"' of Sonn,b,nd. H<
objw w,s ch '. exhihfrion on ,h P Los,, S,hro,v,n' . ." ,h, rumeci,I
angrng.i e subjecr of how the mmally
co involved a ,J<,. '° ,h, ,xhibidon" issu<" 'Th< Obj<e<' ('De< Gq;,nsrnnd'). (4583)
[Septembe mernporary art
Beeren an~ o:1fc:ober 1967) 25document

A Novemberlists
1968 the following cities under the title 'participants', suggesting
bend su ggesrs
g that
ensrvan
Ileana
Elk Smakes a tour wish-list: 'Brussels , Paris, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Turin, London,
8 Oce,b,
onnabend visit Dutch amst
comm wfrh fr,f
. Ge
.'
Elk
= .s,,.,_ Stockholm and Hamburg'. (4588)
Gilardi hr-6 November 1967 ian artJSt Piero Gilardi.
V: as an exh .b .. 1 December J968
than
at
Elk men rions
. i mon . atG"Gal ene . M" k . Loenersloo h N Gilardi writes to Beeren in French with contact details of people to visit in
useum,; ntes
he w . t accompa
seemg I Jard" 's
1 wor1ck ery
. m
in rhi· t, t e erherlands
,ournaat0in
· 1968.3 nya n amcle . by the sconr
I ralian · h.
~xt m · th e US and Western Europe. (4853)
M arnste published
introduction
in
6 December
!"".n wd"' '°
1968 ,h, "'i" Jo,n-Michd S,n,jou,nd, in p,ds, ,sking if
'm,ght visi, him on 17 o,œmb<'. On ,h, s,me d,y, h< w,i«s l,um ,o
' " " ' " hi, """'h imo B,idsh """'· H, ,sks Ri,h"d Long ,bou< ID<
possibility O f vmung
p · · · h.,m ,n
· Bns<o
· l on 18 D,œmb"' ,n d con.su lu Gwge
0
'Mar1nus
. B
and c·· oeum, Jan 0-
2S 1/S van Tuy!
ee Sdm • ibbers ' Ri n1. Dip el ."t "• " ,ha< dm, no< y« P'" of G;ib,« & G,o,g<, ,bou< m«dng h im
wirh w·
Ger im Becren' K, and Barr D B p ' Ger van Elk ' An k Marcar, Ad Perersen
a Klein Essink 0
ink_ ondon on 19 December. He approaches Rowan Gallery in London
3 van Elk , ' unst & M. e aere '" FI g ' " " possibl, ,o visi, on 20 D,c,mb« ,o look M wo<k, by B,uy
as m 'f . .
vol.13, no ·4 ' '1968,
1nrroduc1ion
p.
·
uuumjourn
ro Piero f Op Losse
Gilar/0' ~ol.6, no.G Sch roeven ": An Interview
. ' I 995, pp.42-43.
1• M1croemo rive
h'ana gan, simultaneously writing co Flanagan himself to see if he can meet
198 Ar c,• ,n11se11mjo11rnt1al.
,.,
,m 6eforehand. (4582)
_, -
The Exhibition 1 -w·,m Beeren k for 21 March 1969 in reply to Seth Siegelaub's
sed a wor h.b. . 3
Lollg propo . a one-day ex J J[Jon:
o ;d1ard _1,e part in
The making of a cont emporary "" . n ro rai-
invirat10 h flash photograph showing the tide level ofthe
• . h·b· 1
negot1at1on with che expenences
. ex 1 1tion t·k I e th· o/21 Marc -
everyd ay life. At its best and . ' encounters, vis1·c Is one is JJidnight, 2 wells
Rivtr Avon at Ho~ ofthe dawn Jrom Bristol Suspe7:sion Bridge
torm o f d.iscussion that' natuusmg ll
tod , s and
ay s fashionabl
, at b
convers . est, i arn - photograp h f the dusk Jrom Severn Bridge
discussion. Or perhaps it . h ra creates the o e terminolo at1~ns of 6 prn - Photo~rcZ _ J flash photograph showing the tide level ofthe
6.30
f; h IS t e art itself th PPortun· gy, it ·
ort ' constructs its own form f at, through. ity for fu ' 1 JJ;dnight, 2112,; lis
o natural selection~• its exhibition andrtbe,
. Avon at notwe
River ing note of constants in a flowing process. He
Artists. lend their works to our group show d so k
permit one work to be confronted . h s an themed exh'b• 1 . ong descn'bes a cyc. le,. ta
• g che relations becween t h e posmon·· of t h e sun
der ermrnmg
· · marks pomrs. by v1sua 1isrn l b . ,
He indicaces natural aws, ut 1sn t contemptuous
t h e space ' with ics h YP hwu anoth h 1t1on l, L
ens, pau er, t l ey ace ept an s: tbl'
• ., and che 1eve1off:the water.
_ he necessary flashlight sh ot. Th e work 1s · th e 1'd ea, Jt·
w h ere one work appears becwe en t h e works ofses, wa
oth ers.kways , Ies andoutsider
t' kn ou, frheir relared actsl t ic manifests icself as a spatial work by drawing
acceprs .natura b 1 cyc es,recognisable parts of a Jan dscape. It ch araccenses · t he
0
The ride. Untitled? But we thought· let' l . ect1ons

conn . b ecween f h . . d
crascing che recorded stages o t e nsrng an setnng sun. .
people should be required to follo; s ~t east g1ve an indication of h fl ow ofht1me• Yc·Jl
conche (relative) nature of the contrast: dawn an d d us k - t h e
h. a traJectory traced fi wy
room t Jrte~n. We think chat we have found chat m . r~m room one to Then. t eref his sci'rck
1
darkness and flood. Sul,·t t h ere 1s
· t h e sh•fc
1 b roug h t m ·
what you (snll) do not see~ Buc chac's coo fl . otivauon. I see, I see closmg o t e ·
' . h . un attenng to us Too h' ' by the element of cime: ; 0/21 co 22/23 ~arch, presen~ here only as a
W,
h e h ave
. ch e ng c' to a title ' one based on . . masoc
our own perceptions f hmie.. cernent. Whac is Longs work? The cho1ce and rhymmg of faces and
appenrng. There is a confrontation becween these artists h ohw at u :f:uations. Also the way in which chat choice manifests icself: the proposai,
anyway, beyond us and outside of chis particular arrangemen/ at appens rhe execution of the proposai, the resulcs of chat execution and, among
orher things, four piccures.
So, the ci_tle 'op loss_e schroeven', literally 'on loose screws', presupposes a
construcnon chat, w1th proper connections and cighc relations between the Again, change as a formative or farm-giving principle. Take an objecc:
parts, would make a unified whole. Loosening che screws a bit does nor [Gil~erto] Zorio's wricing tabler. One writes wichout ink - simply by fig .16
break chose relations but only disrupts them. The connections suddcnly ~xemng pressure chrough a scylus - on a sheet of paper. The paper is chrown
become a difficulty, no longer leading towards unicy and harmony. But rherc mto a cage and lands on a heated copper base. It catches fire, first in the
~re not only parts, not only independent entities. One stil! sees rh_cm areas that are indented by the writing. The writing becomes legible, just for
irrevocably connected to one anocher. That is where che figurative me~ning a moment, before the paper is incinerated.
of 'op Josse schroeven' cornes in, offering a negative description of uni~as
shaky, u~cercain, wichour grip. The old concept of arc, in the s~ns; :h:;
and sublimation, is in the process of being shaken and undermine · n lo
0
~i Change as] B
[Mari
nus
a formaci ve pnncip
oezem Th
. . le. A mm1mum
h ·
. .
Visualised throu h · . e_ weat er s1tuanon, •
of persona! intervention.
the scare of the weacher.
h'b'. l . chisprocess. facts The p . . gl sciennfically composed charcs. Boezem accencuates the fig.12
ex I Itlon, we mostly see the active role chat art P ays in rhe win . ds, asirs
ot er wor s, here the art has not so much been t h rown ro . nnc1p e, so ic seems co me, o f t he never-ready-made.
h ·h d h k groun d· In an
a~mg put many apparently logical relations onto s .Y ) rhis art
acuve sense (and, for chose inveterate idealists, in a posmve se;:~
conrrast
Bill Ballin ger. .,.,tWo tubes c
move in relati
and project (ho
' onnecced bY h.mges or by plastic tubing. Free co
on to) eachh othe r. C ons1.d er, ror
c example, the situation in Art
fig .26 and 72
pr~duces conflict wichin stade relationships. le chooses change 4
the phenomenonme of , h.w ere elem ents are Ieanmg
· agamst
· a wa Il , reg1stermg
·- ·
as Jts formative, or form-giving, principles.
t is aod of the floor as the determining factor. Thwarting
·n 1hc iEN : For th xh' .

- ' ,arcdr based curatore eandibuion
Eu deal 'MS ahrc.h 1969,, also known as 'One Monrh', New York-
r Ed' ' Schroeven apP dirccror
Hors Note: This rexr by rhe curator of 'Op Losse d d Wilde, chc Jll 1nn's Marropean
h an1srs . ro eacher etak S1egeIau b mvite
. . d a group of North American and
catalogue for the exhibition, afrer an introduction by E/ b e f-{arald SV:~ ,nd i EN:c Thl 969 · m e a work on an assigned
· day during che mon th of
?~ th e Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Ir was follo_wed s ~eco.Jll' forJ!l Ra vesre1in
.. e Amsrerd
and Geen ga1lery
amvan
drary and rravelogue' for his exhibition 'When AttJtU e ~s'· B .. Arr & Pr 0 Ject
. was founded in 1968 by Adriaan van
rext by p·tero G.I
• ard'1 ( ,Polmcs
. . and the Avant- Gar de') · , 0 n Joo 5' scr'' e11eren.
2 Translat
ors'Nore: ,Op losse schroeven gezet,, 1·itera Uy put
Author biographies
Wim Beeren (1928-2000) curaced 'Op Losse Schroeven' ac the Scedelijk

Museum, Amsterdam, where he worked as a curacor afcer having had che
same role ac the Gemeencemuseum in The Hague. In 1971, afcer leaving the
Scedelijk, he organised the incernacional public sculpture exhibition
Sonsbeek 71, 'Sonsbeek Buiren de Perken' ('Sonsbeek Beyond Lawn and
Order'), in and around Arnhem in the Necherlands. He lacer became an arr
hiscory lecrurer ac the University of Groningen. Beeren was the direccor of
the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam from 1978 to 1985
and chen of the Scedelijk Museum from 1985 to 1993.
the e ro ean domination of american art in the 1970s 199
once said: “Americans may not reali e this, but several artists of roughly
my generation—Donald udd, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Robert
Ryman, Lawrence Weiner, ames Lee Byars, and others—have told me that
their reputation’ was first established in Europe.”50
Another European who played an active role in the promotion of American
Postminimal and Conceptual art in Europe was Piero Gilardi. An artist from
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 22:21 28 June 2017
Turin, Gilardi had been one of the first artists to join Gian En o Sperone when
he opened his gallery in 1964. Sperone had then introduced him to Sonnabend,
who gave him a show in Paris in January 1967 and secured a series of shows
for him in partner galleries. In February, Gilardi’s show traveled to the Galerie
Aujourd’hui in Brussels in April it was in Hamburg at the Galerie Neuendorf
in uly at the Gallery wirner in Cologne in September at the Fischbach Gallery
in New York and finally it landed at the Galery ichery in Amsterdam. n
the occasion of his New York exhibition, Gilardi spent two months in the
United States. In New York, Gilardi met the artists of the Fischbach Gallery,
including those who had participated in Lucy Lippard’s Eccentric Abstraction
exhibition in 1966. He felt they shared the artistic and anthropologic desire
to create through their work an “existential outlet outside the system.”51
His conversations with Eva Hesse and Frank Viner, in particular, convinced
him of the necessity to recogni e their common Postminimal experiments at
an international level, to identify a global artistic community that worked
at “the disintegration of the cultural limits,” and to foster an international
“community experience.”52 From New York, Gilardi went to California. As
he explained, “my idea, an idea that I had already had in Europe, was that in
America I wanted to see above all those Californian artists who, in the area
of funk’ art, have reali ed a dimension which is organic, emotive, sensitive,
in relationship to a typically American type of conditioning of life.”53 Out
West, Gilardi did not have the safety net of a gallery network to welcome
him, as he did in New York. As a result, Gilardi’s experiences in California
happened “by means of friendships” and chance encounters. Gilardi was very
impressed by the Californian artists he met, and regarded his time there as
“the most important experience” he had in the United States.
Back in Italy, Gilardi published a diary of his American travels in the newly
created Italian maga ine Flash Art in November 1967, as Will Grohmann
had done almost 20 years earlier.54 He was acting on his desire not only to
inform his Italian colleagues of the new developments in American art but
also to create a bridge between American and European artists interested in
what he called “entropic sensibility.” As an oni had done a decade before,
Gilardi then decided to travel through Western Europe to meet other artists
working in the entropic vein. He first went to London with the artist Icaro.
There, they met Richard Long, Barry Flanagan, George Pasmore, and ark
Boyles. They next traveled to D sseldorf, where they met the artists of the
ero-Gruppe, Beuys, Schmela, and Fischer, who had just opened his gallery.
200 the rise and fall of american art, 1940s–1980s
6.2 Piero Gilardi’s exhibitions and

travels in 1967.
Key:
1 Turin 2 Paris 3 Brussels 4 Hamburg
5 New York 6 California 7 Amsterdam
8 Turin 9 London 10 D sseldorf 11 Paris
Gilardi published the diary of his experiences in London and D sseldorf

in Flash Art, continuing his project of sharing information and making
connections.55 Finally, in December 1967, Gilardi went to Paris with the art
critic Tommaso Trini. There they met Ger van Elk, who drew their attention
to two young Dutch artists: Dibbets and arinus Boe em. In the fall of
1968, Gilardi published the article “Primary Energy and the icromotive
Artists” in Arts Magazine, in which he discussed both American and Western
European Conceptual artists, thereby informing the American audience
about the Western European scene.56
As a result of his extensive travels, Gilardi was one of the best informed
people on international artistic developments (Fig. 6.2). He was thus able
to recommend Long, Boe em, Dibbets, and van Elk to Germano Celant and
Marcello Rumma, who were organizing Art Povera e Azioni Povera, a one-day
show that took place in Amalfi in ctober 1968. Although Celant had been
promoting the concept of Arte Povera since 1967,57 the Amalfi show was the
first event in which he included artists who were not Italian. In his book Arte
Povera, published in 1969, Celant discussed Andre, Beuys, Boe em, Flanagan,
Haacke, Hesse, Nauman, Sonnier, van Elk, and other artists whom Gilardi
had met during his travels.58 Besides Celant, Gilardi also talked to Sperone
about the artists he had met abroad. Sperone, who was showcasing Arte
Povera in his gallery, became interested in the American and European artists
Gilardi had met and started collaborating with Fischer. In arch 1968 Sperone
exhibited Flavin in arch 1969, orris and in the fall of 1969, Andre. A
group show followed that included, among others, Nauman, Kosuth, Weiner,
and Huebler.59
Considering his extensive knowledge of the Western European and
American art scenes, Gilardi was the necessary intermediary for Wim
the e ro ean domination of american art in the 1970s 201
Beeren, then curator of the Stedelijk useum in Amsterdam, and Harald

S eemann, the curator of the Kunsthalle in Bern, who in 1968 were both
planning exhibitions of Conceptual art. For Beeren’s Op Losse Schroeven,
which opened in Amsterdam in arch 1969, Gilardi did not contribute a
work of art per se, but he was represented by a long essay, “Politics and
the Avant-Garde,” which was published in the catalogue and in which he
commented on the situation of the arts in Europe and the United States.60
Gilardi’s art was also absent from Szeemann’s en Attitudes ecome o m,
which opened in September 1969, but he was acknowledged by Szeemann
in the catalogue as someone who told him about the art scene in the United
States, including the Californian artists, before he went to the United States
looking for artists to include in the show. In preparation for his trip, S eeman
also met Ricke, who provided him with a list of contacts. In December 1968
Szeemann traveled throughout the United States, visiting studios and
galleries, meeting with collectors and curators, trying to assess the scene
and select the artists he felt were important.61
The role played by Gilardi in Op Losse Schroeven and en Attitudes
ecome o m is exemplary of the way the promotion and representation
of contemporary American art in Western Europe had, by the late 1960s,
become a European a air. When Beeren and S eemann decided to organi e
exhibitions of Conceptual art, they did not ask o A to send them American
examples, as ean Cassou had done in the 1950s. Instead, they organi ed their
own shows, which reflected their own ideas of what the best of contemporary
American art might be. Furthermore, they first sought advice from other
Western Europeans who had been or were in the United States, not from
Americans. The Europeans were bypassing the American system of promotion
and using their own, independent transatlantic networks.
When Szeemann became the director of documenta V, scheduled for 1972,
he surrounded himself with a team of European collaborators, who knew
about both the European and American scenes and thus did not need the help
of American curators to identify American artists. The sections dedicated to
Conceptual art, “Idea/Licht,” and “Idea,” which included many Americans,
were selected by Klaus Honnef and Fischer, the latter of whom was then
representing most of the American Conceptual artists ean-Christophe
Ammann curated the very American section on “Fotorealisten,” which
featured, among others, Chuck Close, Ralph Goings, and Duane Hanson
and K nig brought to Kassel ldenburg’s Mouse Museum, a walk-through
sculpture in the shape of a Mickey Mouse head, in which the artist displayed
a collection of artifacts. The times when Porter cCray and the International
Program would select American artworks and send them to Kassel were
long past. Americans were no longer the ones to decide what American art
Europeans should see. Europeans were now deciding what American art was
important and deserved to be documented.
Chapter 1. The ‘self-portraits’ of Dutch artists Bas Jan Ader and Ger
van Elk

1.1 Introduction

This chapter aims to retrace the memory of the artistic mentality of the artists Ger van Elk
and Bas Jan Ader that is reflected through their presence in their works of art, particularly in
Van Elk’s series The Adieu (1974-1975) (Figure 5a-f) and Ader’s unfinished trilogy In search
of the miraculous (1973-1975) (Figure 6a-e). Ader’s and Van Elk’s artistic mentalities and
practices will be examined from different viewpoints. The first section will give an overview
of Van Elk’s an Ader’s involvement in the historical context of conceptual art; subsequently,
it will attempt to delineate the methodology of conceptual art. The third section will
examine the idea of irony: an essential component in both van Elk’s and Ader’s works of art,
which will be developed from the reception of their attitudes and practices by various art
historians and critics. This chapter will conclude with a visual analysis of the two selected
‘self-portraits’: Van Elk’s series The Adieu and Ader’s unfinished trilogy In search of the
miraculous, aiming to address the meaning of the presence of the artists in their works.
Finally, this chapter will work towards the hypothesis that these works of art can be
understood as self-portraits within allegories, in which the artists’ presence embodies a
modern form of authenticity, which, in Van Elk’s case, can be understood as an ironic form of
self-reflection, and, in Ader’s, as a form of tragic self-irony.

1.2 The historical contextualisation of conceptual art with references to the

work of Van Elk and Ader

The first questions that need to be posed are: How are Ger van Elk and Bas Jan Ader related
to conceptual art? And: Why are they often described as conceptual artists? The exhibition
catalogue Conceptuele kunst in Nederland en Belgie 1965-1975, published by the Stedelijk
Museum in 2002, provides a diagram (Appendix 1) that includes Van Elk and Ader as
participants in exhibitions and galleries in the Netherlands that focus on conceptual art. This
diagram serves as a starting point to investigate the links between conceptual art in the
Netherlands and both artists.
The diagram indicates the period between 1968 and 1975 as the pinnacle of
conceptual art in the Netherlands; these were the first years to bring into view the rise of
15

the new art, or what is now called conceptual art. Hence, Van Elk and Ader belong to this
first generation of conceptual artists. Only later, in the mid-1970s, despite conceptual art’s
opposition against it, institutionalization and the market mechanism were put into motion.42
Van Elk participated in the first landmark exhibition of conceptual art, called Op losse
schroeven: Situaties en Cryptosculpturen, which aimed to exhibit the new tendencies in
European and American art in the Netherlands.43 Wim Beeren organised the exhibition that
took place at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam from March 15 to April 27, 1969.44 This
year marked a paradigm shift towards a new art, according to Carel Blotkamp.45 Beeren also
writes in the exhibition catalogue that ‘the old concept of art, in the sense of order and
sublimation’ was in the process of being ‘shaken and undermined’ and that the ‘new art’
produced a ‘conflict within static relationships’.46
For the exhibition, Van Elk made various interventions in direct response to the site,
which altered the experience for the museum visitors. For example, outside the museum,
Van Elk replaced the brickwork on the street corner, adjacent to the museum, with glazed
bricks. Like the title Luxurious Street Corner (1969) (Figure 7) suggests, van Elk created a
more ‘luxurious’ rectangular corner to a rounded pavement edge.47 The work may be seen
as an ironic, subtle critique of the aloofness between the museum and reality, as a secluded,
canonising institution for only ‘high art’, and as a comment on the role of public art as mere
urban adornment. Inside the museum, Van Elk installed two works: Apparatus Scalas
Dividens (1968) (Figure 8) and Hanging Wall (1968) (Figure 9), which both humorously
disrupted the interaction of visitors within the museum, by making situations
uncommunicative.48
Later, in 1971, Van Elk, as well as Ader, took part in the film programme Sonsbeek
’71, which was part of the exhibition Sonsbeek buiten Perken in Arnhem, also curated by

42
Blotkamp, 2002, p. 26.
43
Ibidem, p. 17. The exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form – Works, Concepts, Processes, Situations,
Information, curated by Harald Schzeemann at the Kunsthalle in Bern, also opened in 1969, is often described as the more
important and popular counterpart of the exhibition in Amsterdam. Christian Rattemeyer gives an extensive comparison of
the two exhibitions in his book Exhibiting the New Art ‘Op Losse Schroeven’ and ‘When Attitudes Become Form’ 1969,
published in 2010.
44
Rattemeyer, 2010, p. 28. The exhibition has become known in English as Square Pegs in Round Holes, a title proposed by
museum director Edy de Wilde (Cherix (ed.), 2009, p.38).
45
Blotkamp, 2002, p. 17.
46
Beeren, 1969, np. The title, derived from a Dutch idiomatic expression, indicates a state of uncertainty or instability.
Beeren explains it, as follows: ‘[C]onnectors tie an assembly of parts together into one united whole. As the screws come
loose, the connections may not break, but disturb the whole’ (Beeren, 1969, np. See also: Cherix (ed.), 2009, p. 38.).
47
Rattemeyer, 2010, p. 29, p. 68.
48
Ibidem, pp. 29-30, p. 68, p. 77, p. 102.
16

was ‘a kind of ironic, slacker West Coast cousin, conveying a sense of entropic collapse’.65
The magazine was a parody on authoritative art forms and styles, including Minimalism and
Land Art and a subversion of the magazines that established these styles, such as Avalanche
and Artforum.
Both Van Elk and Ader can conclusively be placed within the niche of conceptual art
for having participated in various exhibitions aligned with this type of art. Nonetheless, their
works are very diverse: varying from performances and site-specific works of art to
publications. Conceptual art, therefore, cannot simply be described according to outer
appearances or stylistic characteristics. Rather, the idea that the artist wants to convey gives
rise to the medium and form of the work of art. In Van Elk’s works there are, remarkably,
various direct references to works of other artists or to art historical conventions in general,
often causing irony by subverting them. He addresses the status of the museum, the
megalomania of Land Art and Minimalism, and various works of art of Morandi and Klee.
Ader mainly satirizes the popular contemporary art scene, including Minimalism and Land
Art in Landslide, while his other works are humorous in a different way: less explicit and
more commentary-oriented. They are more like visual aphorisms, for instance, by willingly
bringing oneself into a dangerous situation. This is where Ader internalizes the irony
through the paradoxical or ludic tension brought forth by his actions and statements in his
performances. Both Van Elk and Ader are humorous and seem to subvert the authoritative
status of various artistic styles and conventions, including their own status. They each
appear highly, though distinctly, aware that the context of their work is created through a
continuous dialogue with art history itself. This dialogue and their use of humour will be
addressed more extensively in the third section of this chapter. The aim of the next section
is to begin to describe various characteristics of conceptual art.

1.3 Conceptual art

Having described several connections between conceptual art and the artists Van Elk and
Ader, the question arises: What is conceptual art? First of all, it is important to notice that
conceptual art is not a specific art-movement, nor can it be captured in a singular
characteristic style; it rather functions as an umbrella term used to cover a wide variety of
artistic practices, movements and styles, including Land Art, Process Art, Arte Povera, and
others. Conceptual art could best be described as a methodology or set of strategies that are

65
Allen, 2011, appendix. See also: Bluhm, 2005, pp. 14-15.
19

open and can be carried out in various ways. The following paragraph will first outline the
methodologies according to the art critic Jörg Heiser. In the second section, these will serve
as a benchmark to describe theories on conceptual art in the Netherlands, using texts by
Wim Beeren, Piero Gilardi, and Regina Cornwell.

1.3.1. The methodology of conceptual art

In the article ‘Moscow, Romantic, Conceptualism and After’, published online by E-Flux in
their November 2011 issue #29, Heiser distinguishes three methodological characteristics
of conceptual art. The first methodological characteristic of conceptual art, Heiser explains,
is that it ‘radically shifts the emphasis from representation to indexicalization (…); rather
than reproducing or illustrating the appearance of something, that “something” is evoked
through a gesture or language, or other indexical means (including, literally, signs and
measures).’66 According to Heiser, the main objective is ‘to move away from the visual and
the phenomenological (…) toward the indexical, toward pointing to things in an idea-driven
way (…)’.67
Heiser distinguishes, as the second methodology, that ‘conceptual art usually adheres
to a fairly strict, reductivist ethos of economy of means. (…) In other words, the idea is that
for indexicalization to be most effective, it needs to be realized with as many elements as are
necessary but as few as possible’.68 The aim of this methodology, Heiser states, is ‘at the
service of either strictly securing or “closing” the meaning, or, to the contrary, of allowing
the work to become a kind of springboard that (…) opens up meaning - for better or worse -
to the viewer’s perceptive response and intellectual continuation.’69
Thirdly, Heiser elaborates on the tendency towards dematerialization in conceptual
art, which means to do away with the cohesiveness of the artwork in terms of where it
‘resides’. In other words, Heiser explains:

[E]ven if an object is involved (…) or if the artist’s or anyone else’s body enacts a
gesture (…) the work may still be constituted by neither a particular object nor a
particular body. A relationship between things in the world is stated without
necessitating a physical realization of that relationship to constitute the artwork.
Rather, it may simply be constituted by the proposition of the artist (immaterial

66
Heiser, 2011, pp. 1-2. <http://www.e-flux.com/journal/29/68122/moscow-romantic-conceptualism-and-after/> Web. 06
April 2016. This may imply a devaluation of virtuosic skill and originality or distinctive authenticity.
67
Ibidem, pp. 1-2.
68
Ibidem, p. 2.
69
Ibidem, p. 2.
20

production); it may reside in the particular way something is situated or
conveyed through, for example, its position in a space or publicized through
press releases, invitation cards, catalogues, and so forth (distribution or
circulation); it may reside in the way the viewers “fulfil” the work through their
use of or response to it (“consumption” or reception); or, indeed, it may be a
mixture of all three of these parameters of production, distribution, and
consumption. The shorthand term for the specificities of this particular mixture
is “context.”70

Dematerialization, according to Heiser, leads to a formal reduction, but, more importantly,
continues ‘questioning the way things are made, disseminated, and perceived - with obvious
social and political implications’.71 Heiser’s three methodologies of conceptual art can be
summarized as follows: a) indexicalization b) reductivism c) context; the artwork resides in
(or in a combination of) the immaterial production, distribution and circulation,
consumption and reception.

1.3.2. Conceptual art in the Netherlands: Beeren, Gilardi and Cornwell

Heiser’s set of methodologies can be related to various statements from the catalogues
accompanying the exhibitions on conceptual art, as discussed in the first section of this
chapter. These primary texts can serve to further explicate and contextualize the
methodologies of conceptual art in the Netherlands. This section will focus on texts by Wim
Beeren, Piero Gilardi, and Regina Cornwell.
Firstly, two texts by Beeren will be used to highlight Heiser’s distinctions, namely his
text in the catalogue of Op Losse Schroeven (1969), and later his memorabilia in the
catalogue of the exhibition ’60 ’80 attitudes/concepts/images (1982). 72 Concerning
indexicalization, Beeren refers to art’s detachment of traditional forms and the aspect of
crafts, and he points to the new possibilities in art, such as the use of unconventional
materials (neon, mirrors and latex) and abstract measuring systems.73 Beeren identifies a
‘new reality’ as a collective principle in conceptual art, which he finds most succinctly
embodied in Richard Long’s art, made by walking in the landscape.74 With this, he points to
works that are bilateral. They exist as ideas that are developed through empirical

70
Ibidem, pp. 2-4.
71
Ibidem, p. 4.
72
This exhibition looked back at two decades of programming of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
73
Beeren, [1969] 2010, p. 123.
74
Cherix (ed.), p. 38, p. 44.
21

investigations and physical experiences: in an immediate connection between the artist and
reality, as Beeren adds: ‘the human form as sculptural material’, or as ‘a registering
measuring organism’ in art.75 Subsequently, the works are included in the museum, where
they exist as either indexical spheres of reality, using photographs, maps; or as objects
collected outdoors and taken indoors, changing their environment and placing them in
another context. By this indexicalization, visitors have the opportunity to empathize with
the artist’s process and to, even imaginarily, move into the landscape.76
Regarding the reductivist ethos of conceptual art, Beeren mentions the modesty of
means and materials and the ‘minimum of personal intervention’ with which the artists
worked.77 Following Beeren:

[T]he most exact formulations are sought and placed in accentuated space and
emptiness. Every serviceable medium is withdrawn from its ordinary usage and
employed in a highly concentrated form: language, photography, film, sound, the
geographical map, the floor plan, the drawing.78

He emphasizes conceptual art’s manifestation in the ‘purification to the essence of things’, in
conclusion, art has ‘produced a new language of analysis; a concentrated, conceptual
approach to exegesis and understanding (…)’.79
Lastly, for an explanation of the importance of context, Beeren refers to Robert
Morris’ concept of ‘Anti-Form’, explained in the synonymous essay published in Artforum in
April 1968. In his rejection of Minimalist art, Morris proposed a new art, emphasizing the
process of the formation of art. In this so-called ‘process art’ material qualities, procedural
concerns (gathering, stacking, piling, etc.), and unplanned events all add up to the end
result. 80 Beeren refers to works that are subject to external influences, change, and

75
Beeren, 1982, p. 51. Rattemeyer (ed.), 2010, p. 51, p. 59.
76
Beeren, [1969] 2010, pp. 123-124.
77
Ibidem, p. 79, pp. 119-120.
78
Beeren, 1982, p. 52.
79
Ibidem, p. 51. See also: Rattemeyer (ed.), 2010, p. 58.
80
Robert Morris in: Rattemeyer (ed.), 2010, p. 35, pp. 44-45. Instead of focusing on the physical and its relations, Morris
emphasizes the process of making art. An artist should investigate the properties of the materials in progress. Morris:
‘Recently, materials other than rigid industrial ones have begun to show up. (…) A direct investigation of the properties of
these materials is in progress. This involves a reconsideration of tools in relation to material. In some cases these
investigations move from the making of things to the making of material itself. Sometimes a direct manipulation of a given
material without the use of any tool is made. In these cases considerations of gravity become as important as those of
space. The focus on matter and gravity as means results in forms, which were not projected in advance. Considerations of
ordering are necessarily casual and imprecise and unemphasized. Random piling, loose stacking, hanging, give passing form
to the material. Chance is accepted and indeterminacy is implied since replacing will result in another configuration.
Disengagement with preconceived enduring forms and orders for things is a positive assertion. It is part of the work's
refusal to continue aestheticizing form by dealing with it as a prescribed end’ (Morris, 1993, p. 46).
22

transience. Furthermore, Beeren includes artworks that force the beholder to take a
position. Through the most concentrated formulations in unconventional materials, the new
art affects the beholder and leads the viewer to rethink reality.81
The Italian art critic Piero Gilardi, who served as an advisor in the exhibition Op Losse
Schroeven (1969), inspired Beeren’s statements.82 Beeren writes:

Gilardi coined the term ‘Mircoemotive Art’ to describe this environment, while
others forged different descriptions, such as the ‘Arte Povera’ of the critic
[Germano] Celant, Lucy Lippard’s ‘Eccentric Emotion’, or what Robert Morris
called ‘Anti-Form’.83

Gilardi’s essay ‘Primary Energy and the “Microemotive Artists”’, published in Dutch in
Museumjournaal in September 1968, was particularly influential.84
In opposition to ‘primary structures’, referring to Minimal art, Gilardi proposed the
terms ‘primary energy’ and ‘microemotive’. 85 These terms refer to the immaterial
production of the work. Gilardi defined the terms as the ‘attention to the “floatingness” of
intentions and observation; the object of the micro-emotive artist is primary energy’.86 The
artist should create works from both a flowing intentionality: an open free creative
mentality that was no longer based on the conventions of traditional art, and a
contemplative or perceptive attitude. The artist should have a ‘new “open” mental
perception of weightless energy’, according to Rattemeyer.87
Furthermore, Gilardi emphasizes the ‘psycho-physical time’ of the artist and the
‘sensorial perception’ of the viewer, which can be aligned to Heiser’s statement about the
immaterial production and consumption and reception of the work. In addition, the
changeable conditions of events and the atmospheric space that could influence the artist

81
Beeren, 1982, pp. 52-53.
82
Rattemeyer (ed.), 2010, p. 48. See also: Blotkamp, 2002, p. 20. Beeren and the director of the Stedelijk Museum Edy de
Wilde thank Piero Gilardo for his contributions in the foreword and introduction of the catalogue. Gilardi contributed with
his essay ‘Politics and the Avant-Garde’ to the exhibition catalogue.
83
Beeren [1969] 2010, pp. 124-125.
84
Rattemeyer (ed.), 2010, p. 46. See also: Cherix (ed.), 2009, p. 39, p. 44. Gilardi’s work was known in the Netherlands
through an exhibition of his foam sculptures at Mickery Gallery in Loenersloot (October 8- November 6, 1967). The article
was first published in English as ‘Primary Energy and the ‘’Mircoemotive artists’’’ in Arts Magazine, vol. 43,
September/October, 1968, pp. 48-52. A related text appeared simultaneously in Dutch as ‘Microemotive art’ in
Museumjournaal 13, no. 4 (1968), pp. 198-202. Ger van Elk wrote the introduction to the Dutch text. The first draft of the
exhibition concept submitted to de Wilde by Beeren explicitly refers to this essay written by Gilardi in the title
‘Cryptosculpturen en Microemoties‘ (‘Cryptostructures and Microemotions’), dated 25 December 1968.
85
Gilardi refers to the term and title for curator Kynaston McShine’s exhibition of Minimal art in the Jewish Museum in New
York in 1966.
86
Gilardi in: Bijvoet (ed.), 1995, p. 53.
87
Rattemeyer (ed.), 2010, p. 46.
23

and his work were key aspects.88 Instead of a structure of fixed objects, time and energy
were thus of principle importance.
Lastly, regarding the use of film for indexicalisation, Regina Cornwell describes some
interesting characteristics that adhere to the reductivist methodology of conceptual art in
her essay ‘introduction to structural film’ in the exhibition catalogue of Sonsbeek ‘71. The
concept of ‘structural film’, originally developed by the film critic P. Adams Sitney,
corresponds to the films shown at the Sonsbeek exhibition, including those by Van Elk and
Ader. In quoting Sitney, Cornwell states that structural film is characterized by:

[a] fixed camera position (fixed frame from the viewer’s perceptive), the
flicker effect, and loop printing (the immediate repetition of shots, exactly
without variation). Very seldom will one find all three characteristics in a
single film, and there are structural films, which avoid these usual elements.89

Through these ‘acts of honing down the materials involved and often through revealing the
process of making, through the rejection of metaphor, symbol, myth, narrative and illusion’
the attention shifts to the ontology of film.90 Simultaneously, the perceptual demands for the
viewer increase; he is forced to question the film’s material, processing sensuously and
analytically. The film thus resides in its context, how it is produced and perceived. It resides
in its ontology, instead of in the narrative.91

1.3.3. A synthesis

To conclude: the methodologies of conceptual art as described by Heiser coincide with
various perceptions by Beeren, Gilardi and Cornwell. The artistic practice is unhinged from
representation of the phenomenological world. Indexing reality or relationships between
things in the world, including experiences, emotions, conventions, or nature, in an idea
driven way, is the new artistic methodology. The artist can use various indexes, ranging
from all different materials and mediums, to carry out his ideas. Then, conceptual art follows
a reductivist principle; mediums and materials are used in a minimal and modest way, and
personal intervention is avoided as much as possible. Likewise, structural film implies a
reduction of the technological and formal options, and avoids narrative and illusion.

88
Ibidem, p. 48. See also: Cherix (ed.), 2009, p. 39.
89
Van Beijeren, 1971, pp. 112.6-112.8.
90
Ibidem, p. 112.6
91
Ibidem, pp. 112.6-112.8.
24

Subsequently, both methodologies result in a ‘dematerialization’ of the artwork.
Instead of its physical realisation, the work of art resides in its context, which consists of the
immaterial production, the distribution and circulation, and the consumption and reception.
Immaterial production coincides with the ‘primary energy’ of the artist; his psychophysical
state, influenced by the time and place in which he operates, which influences and informs
his sensorial perception and inventiveness, as described by Gilardi. The second aspect refers
to the way a work is produced: in what medium, how it is situated, and the external
conditions that influence the processes of the work. The reception refers to the way a work
of art affects the beholder’s experience, imagination, or perception. Thus, the work actually
resides in its ontology, instead of its physical being. By which is meant that the work is not
the fixed object, not inside the narrative of the object, but rather in the intention or ideas of
the artist, in its manner of production, or in its reception by the viewer.
These different methodologies can help to analyse Van Elk’s and Ader’s self-portraits
in the last section of this chapter. Apart from this understanding of the methodologies of
conceptual art, Van Elk’s and Ader’s reflectivity on their position within art history and their
ironic or subversive attitude, as described in the first section of this chapter, has not yet
been taken into account. Therefore, the next section aims to address the presence of irony
that both artists demonstrate in their works of art.

1.4 Reception: irony

In this section a closer examination of the reception of irony in Van Elk’s and Ader’s artistic
attitudes and practices will be given. This section will focus on their conscious stance of
their position within art history, and their ironic or subversive attitudes towards other
works of art and its historical conventions. According to Heiser, the conceptual artist is
either ‘a kind of trickster who subverts the authority of cultural tradition by suspending the
parameters by which it is perpetuated (e.g. skill, composition, preciousness of the object,
and so forth)’, or ‘an intellectual master, who much like a philosopher, successively unfolds a
system of analysis that enlightens us with respect to the historical obsolescence of these
traditions’.92 The central question in this section is: How are Ader’s and Van Elk’s authorship
or artistic attitude understood and described by various art historians and art critics? Can
they be described as tricksters, do they indeed lean towards the intellectual master type, or

92
Heiser, 2011, p. 4. <http://www.e-flux.com/journal/29/68122/moscow-romantic-conceptualism-and-after/> Web. 06
April 2016.
25

maybe a mixture of both? The next section will first focus on the reception of Van Elk’s
artistic attitude and practice. Subsequently, it will turn to the way in which critics approach
Ader’s artistic mentality and practice.

1.4.1. Ger van Elk: ironic self-reflection

At the heart of Van Elk’s authorship is an ambiguity between seriousness, or even
melancholy, and humour. The art historian Rudi Fuchs remarks on this paradox by stating
that the visual humour in van Elk’s work is:

[s]ubject to a deeply serious artistic intent. This gives rise to a curious
paradox which is not without significance for Van Elks ambivalent attitude
towards art. His ideas about art are extremely traditional, even conventional
(…) But at the same time he also feels that every work must come across as a
surprising, intriguing, effortless bon mot.93

Fuchs does not elaborate on the coexistence of these contradictory attitudes of Van Elk
towards art, which are important for an understanding of his work.94
A more serious attitude can be found in Van Elk’s referents to, and thus knowledge
of, art itself.95 Carel Blotkamp explains that Van Elk’s oeuvre is ‘riveted on the visual
foundations of the phenomenon of art, on pictorial traditions and conventions (…). Van Elk
contemplates the notions of style and genre (…)’.96 Wim Beeren also addresses this reflexive
attitude, when he explains that Van Elk made the history and methodology of art the starting
point for his works of art.97 Van Elk revisits, investigates, and converts these art historical
conventions, aesthetic views, and methodologies (forms, styles, genres, and themes) into a
new form or visual sign.98 His work, therefore, can be described as ‘a provocation and
continuation of the artistic tradition’.99 Jean-Christophe Ammann, following Erwin Panofsky,
directs this artistic practice of using different layers and recognizable codes under the
heading of ‘symmetry’ or ‘symmetrical tradition’.100 Van Elk’s artistic attitude thus consists

93
Fuchs, ‘On Semantics, Ger van Elk, Structure and other Difficult Terms’, in: Ger van Elk, ex. cat. 1974, p. 49.
94
Ibidem, p. 54.
95
Blotkamp, 1985, pp. 104-105.
96
Blotkamp, 2009, p. 104, p. 106. Blotkamp refers to Van Elk’s knowledge of historical concepts and the phenomenon of
style, which he had gained by his study in art history at the University of Groningen in 1965-66.
97
Beeren, ‘Ger van Elk’ in: Ger van Elk, ex. cat. 1980, p. 19.
98
Ibidem, pp. 16-17, p. 21, p. 33. Kaal, 2009, p. 22, pp. 24-26.
99
Kaal, 2009, p. 28, p. 30, p. 34.
100
Ammann, ‘A Few Ideas About Symmetry in the Work of Ger van Elk’ in: Ger van Elk, ex. cat. 1980, pp. 6-9.
26

of a high level of reasoning and conscious selective attitude. However, this serious artistic
intent is recognizable only, Beeren explains, when someone is accustomed to, and
recognizes, the ‘codes of a collective recognizable reality’.101
Van Elk himself and various art historians explain the intent of Van Elk’s symmetrical
methodology as one of humour and subversion. Van Elk is often called a ‘Spaβvogel’ and
’Witzmacher’, likewise, he states that ‘nichts ist bei mir ernst gemeint’.102 In an interview
from 1977, Van Elk explains his laconic attitude towards art, as he considers the
degradation of former artistic practices and styles into clichés. He tries to connect
conventions and clichés to one another, in order to subvert them.103 By enlarging, exalting,
or minimizing, Van Elk, according to Hans den Hartog Jager, demythologises codes and
conventions of the past.104 Michael Schwarz elaborates on this methodology and designates
Van Elk’s work as ‘Lehrstücke über die Lächerlichkeit von Konventionen’.105 He explains
that

Ger van Elk inszeniert Klischees, Mythen, um sie im gleichen Augenblick ironisch
zu durchbrechen(…). Dadurch entmythologisiert Ger van Elk den etablierten
Wert von Konvention. Sicherlich ist gesellschaftliches Leben ohne Absprachen
und Übereinkünfte nicht möglich.106

Van Elk ridicules the belief in artificial conventions of (art) historical periods, because he
does not belief in absolute truths, which can be subject to adjustment and manipulation. Van
Elk aims to reveal artificial conventions out of which reality is constructed in order to draw
attention to these normally obvious structures.107 Blotkamp also mentions that Van Elk’s
symmetry is not just a ‘simple parody in which the re-use of existing art usually strands’,
rather, Van Elk challenges and undermines the historical classical values of art and the

101
Beeren, ‘Ger van Elk’ in: Ger van Elk, ex. cat. 1980, p. 15.
102
‘Ger van Elk antwortet auf fragen, die Antje von Graevetniz stellte’ in: Ger van Elk, ex. cat. 1977, p. 20, p. 30, p. 46.
103
Ibidem, p. 20. Particularly German Romanticism, Van Elk explains: ‘Die deutsche Romantik ist für mich der Höhepunkt
des vorigen Jahrhunderts. Aber ich finde es eine der schlimmsten Klischees, wenn Leute heute eine romantische Haltung
annehmen, sobald sie über die Vergänglichkeit der Dinge sprechen’ (Van Elk in: Ger van Elk, ex. cat. 1977, p. 31.).
104
Jager, 2004, p. 88.
105
Schwarz, ‘The missing persons oder wie lustig ist die Manipulation’ in: Ger van Elk, ex. cat. 1977, p. 60.
106
Ibidem, p. 60.
107
In Van Elk’s acceptance speech, for winning the J.C. van Lanschot Prize for the Visual Arts at the Kröller-Müller Museum
in Otterlo on 15 June 1996, Van Elk recalls the moment, when he had to change from being Catholic to Protestant and
‘reject everything he taught to believe was sacred’ and belief in the opposite as new truth. This moment he realized, as a
child, that ‘nothing is true’ and that ‘one theory is always interchangeable with another’ (Kaal, 2009, pp. 20-22).
27

Figure 7

Ger van Elk
Luxurious Street Corner, 1969
Exhibition Op losse schroeven, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 1969.

Figure 8

Ger van Elk
Apparatus Scalas Dividens, 1969

130

Figure 9

Ger van Elk
Hanging Wall, 1968
Brick wall hanging above a table

131

16 OCTOBER
By 1960, an alreadyquite developed programof participatoryand interac-

tive aestheticscould be found-in certain ofJasperJohns'sand Rauschenberg's
constructions, Brecht'sassemblages,Kaprow'shappeningsand environments, and
any number of other related neo-Dada projects. But these earlier,more utopian
effortsto dismantlethe conventionality of art throughdirect,participatory inter-
action did notyet"comprehend"the kindof structuralequivalence among object,
language,photograph,and seffound condensed in Morris'sI-Box.It is no histori-
cal accident that self-consciouslyConceptual and linguisticallyoriented art
emergedfromprolonged engagementswithMinimalism, ratherthan directlyfrom
Cagean or neo-Dada practices.27Perhaps more than its situationalor perceiver-
centered aesthetics,the systematicstructuresand repetitiveformsof Minimalist
sculpture representa crucial intervention,which allows the conditions of the
(industriallyproduced, repeatable, contextuallydetermined) readymade to be
read as a generalprincipleof all experience.28
As subsequentcontroversiesaround authenticationand re-fabrication have
made clear,the inherentreproducibility of Minimalistsculptureimplicitlylinksit
to the iterativestructureof the post-Cagean "event," introducing "linguistic"
dimensions on several levels: (1) the works are composed of separable units,
an "idea" or intellectualexercise,but thatthe "work"itselfis reducedto a plan and its realization,even in

projectslike abstractpainting,whichexplicitly disavowthisseriallogicof production.The factthatthere
maybe onlyone instantiation-as in architecture-does not mean thatthis"plan" or "template"is not
present.The programmaticdismissalof the materialrealizationsof a workby manyConceptualartists
reversesthisculturally normativeexpectationof sensuousplenitude.Regardingprojectsby Huebler and
other artists,Siegelaub describes the photographsand other aspects of the material realization as
completelyinessential:"Becauseall thisis a recordof theworkof art,whichis rightbehindit,in a way.It's
not the workof art" ("Seth Siegelaub,April 17, 1969,"in AlexanderAlberroand PatriciaNorvell,eds.,
Recording Conceptual Art:EarlyInterviewswithBarry,HueblerKaltenbach, LeWitt,Morris,Oppenheim, Siegelaub,
Smithson, and Weiner ofCaliforniaPress,2001], p. 34).
[Berkeley:University
27. As Kosuth and other youngerartistswere aware, Morris'splywoodconstructions-"made on
purpose,not found,to be minimal,unimportant, unorderedobjects"-functionlikea linguistic
relatively
proposition,or an "idea," realized in specificbut replaceable materialforms.These "conceptual" or
"linguistic"aspectsof Minimalistartwere not onlyapparentto sympathetic youngerartists,since it was
preciselyon such termsthatClementGreenbergprotestedthat"Minimalworksare readable as art,as
almostanything is today-includinga door,a table,or a blanksheetofpaper.Yetitwouldseem thata kind
of artnearerthe conditionof nonartcould not be envisagedor ideatedat thismoment.That,precisely, is
the trouble.MinimalArtremainstoo mucha featofideation,and notenoughanything else. It remainsan
idea, somethingdeduced insteadoffeltand discovered"(Greenberg,"Recentnessof Sculpture"[1966], in
GregoryBattcock,ed., MinimalArt:A CriticalAnthology [NewYork:E. P. Dutton,1968] p. 183).
28. In "The Crux of Minimalism,"Hal Fosterreads Minimalistsculptureas institutingthisgeneral
structureof repetition,and as releasingtemporal,perceptual,and situationalconcerns into art. Yet
Minimalistsculpturemayultimatelybe a fairlyodd place to look fora "perceiver-centered" or tempo-
rallydrivenaesthetics-particularlygiven the more powerfulprecedentsof Cage's work,or La Monte
Young's extended experimentswithloud single tones and durationalstructures.Minimalismis where
these diversetemporal,perceptual,and site-basedproceduresare recondensed backintothesculptural
object-thusexplainingthe contradictionsin Morris'saccount, such as his otherwisepeculiarassertion
"That the space of the room becomes of such importancedoes not mean thatan environmentalsitua-
tion is being created" ("Notes on Sculpture,Part2,"Artforum 5, no. 2 [October 1966], p. 22).
This content downloaded from 66.194.72.152 on Sat, 31 Aug 2013 14:01:49 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Language BetweenPerformance
and Photography 17
rearrangedand manipulatedanalogouslyto linguisticunits like wordsor letters;

(2) the workis repeatable,just as a statementis re-createdin each specificutter-
ance; (3) the worksacquire their meaning contextually,in relation to site and
viewer,the waya linguisticstatementaccrues meaningin specificuse; (4) the work
operateswithina set of artisticconventionsin relationto whichit formsa kindof
statementabout art;and (5) the worksalso existas fabricationinstructions, which
are analogous blueprints,drawings,and/or diagrams. Conceptual art transfers
these iterativeprinciplesfromindustriallyproduced objects encountered in the
galleryto the mechanicallyreproducedimagesand signs,includinglanguage,typi-
callyencountered on the page and in the informationalcontextof mass media.
Partof the paradox of Weiner'sworkcomes fromhis insistenceon usinglanguage
explicitlypositioned withina communicativefunctionwhile nonethelessremain-
ing "sculpture."He acknowledges this contradictionwhen he states, "the only
thingthatinterestedme was the attemptto deal withthe presentationof informa-
tion by use of materials-paint, canvas, steel, stone, etc.-which had nothingto
do withthe presentationof information."29
Withinthe discourseof Conceptualart,the classicarticulationof the "work"as
a specificrealizationof a generalpropositionis of course Weiner's1968 "Statement
of Intent,"whichdeclared:"1. The artistmayconstructthe piece. 2. The piece may
be fabricated.3. The piece need not be built."30 Yet when Weinerstatesthat"the
decisionas to conditionrestswiththe receiverupon the conditionof receivership,"
he adopts the termsof postwarmedia theory-a communicative model that,though
aimed at securingthe faithfultransmission of information, displacesthe
effectively
locus of meaning of an utterance fromthe private intention of an author (or
"source")to the public contextof channelsof transmission and reception.As Dieter
has
Schwarz argued,Weiner'stersely wordedprotocol
definesa structure,and withinit, the positionsof the artist,the work,
and the recipient.The constructionof a workis not contingentupon
the person of the artist;it is a functionof reception. The statementof
intentis thelogicalconsequence ofinsightintothe formof
linguistic artistic
production. then everyexecuted
If the workis to functionlinguistically,
piece acquires the passing significance of a specific context that
embracesboth artistand user.31
Weinerinsists,in a 1971 interview,that "the workitselfis information."He

goes on to say,"It would be a fascistgestureon mypart if I were to say,you can
29. Weiner in Lynn Gumpert,"Interviewwith Lawrence Weiner,"in EarlyWork(New York: New

Museum, 1982), p. 47.
30. LawrenceWeinerinJanuary5-31, 1969 (NewYork:Seth Siegelaub, 1969), n.p.
31. Dieter Schwarz, "Learn to Read Art: Lawrence Weiner's Books," in LawrenceWeiner,Books
1968-1989: CatalogueRaisonne(Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung,1989), p. 142. As Weiner insists,
forthisdynamicto work,his sculpturesmustbe realizablein order to function:"Iftheywere not possi-
ble to be built,theywould negatethe choice of the receiveras to whetherto build themor not" (Weiner,
statementforProspect '69,KunsthalleDisseldorf).

18 OCTOBER
acceptthingsonlyon a verbalinformation level (typeon thepage).... Iftheinforma-

tionis conveyed,thenthepiece exists.And itdoesn'tmatterifit'sphysically conveyed
or whetherit'sconveyedverballyor orally."32 Thus,likeKosuth,the "information" of
a piece is understoodas somethingthatcan be abstractedfromanyindividualmani-
festation.However,while Kosuth'sconcern is to extricatehis productionfromany
specific,"morphological"definitionof art (e.g., the aestheticformalismsof Clement
Greenberg, Michael Fried, et al.), Weiner targets the underlying structuresof
meaningproduction:
Anyonewho imposes a unique conditionforreceivership,forinterpre-
tation,forseeing a work,is placing art withina contextthat is almost
nineteenth century.There is the specific,unique, emotional object
produced by a prophet, produced by the only person who can make
this.... Aesthetically,it is not viable in 1971 ... to have a prophetic
objectwhichinsiststhatitsuniqueness constitutesitsartness.33
As Buchloh notes,Weiner"detached sculpturefromthe mythicalpromiseof
providingaccessto pure phenomenologicalspace and primarymatterbyinsistingon
the universalcommonavailability of languageas the trulycontemporary mediumof
simultaneouscollectivereception."34 By adopting as his form "an abstract formula-
tion thatallowsunlimitedrealizations," Weineropens his practiceup to temporality,
contextuality,and the constantpossibility ofreinterpretation frequentlyforeclosedin
versionsof Conceptual art thatpursued the linguisticcertaintyof an entirelyself-
enclosed,self-defined system.35 In so doing,Weinerimplicitly drawson the Cagean
of
principles "indeterminacy" that animate Brecht's work and other performance
practices.Schwarz linksWeiner's work to the interactive modes thatemergedaround
Cage, arguing that"Weiner's statement of intent is aligned with the developmentof
reception-oriented artisticpractices,exemplified in the U.S. by the rise of the
Happeningin thelate fifties."36
32. "LawrenceWeinerat Amsterdam," Avalanche 4 (Spring 1972), p. 66. Weinerappears to equivocate
greatlyabout the formalization requiredbyownership,declaring:"There is nevera documentthatpasses
that'ssigned.Quite often,I'll givea piece of paper withthe piece writtenon it,but that'sjust, you know,
myown littlequirkin case theyforgetthe exactwording.But it's neversigned.It's onlygot myname in
block letters,whichis the assumptionof responsibility, or it's on a typedpiece of paper.... The only
record thatsomeone owns the piece is filedwitha lawyeron a typewritten sheet" ("LawrenceWeiner,
June 3, 1969,"Recording ConceptualArt,p. 102). And he consistently poses purchaseof hisworkas a moral
commitment ratherthan a commercialtransaction:"WhatI'm doing is settingup a situationwhereany
waythatthe piece is builtis all right.... If you were to purchaseit, all you would be doing would be to
acceptresponsibility formyproduct,whichis a moralcommitment, ratherthana narrowly aestheticcom-
mitment"("LawrenceWeinerat Amsterdam," p. 69). He even likensit to signinga petition:"The factof
buyingone of myworksis comparable to a signatureat the bottomof a petitionand is, in thissense, to
accept responsibility that the conclusions... are correct"(Weiner in Michel Claura, "Interviewwith
LawrenceWeiner,"VH-101,no. 5 [Paris: Spring 1971], p. 65).
33. "LawrenceWeinerat Amsterdam," p. 70.
34. "Benjamin Buchloh in conversation with Lawrence Weiner,"in LawrenceWeiner(London:
Phaidon, 1998), p. 19.
35. Schwarz,"Learn to Read Art,"p. 131.
36. Ibid., p. 142.

and Photography
Language BetweenPerformance 19
Far left:LawrenceWeiner.
_p d s w Realizationof ONE AEROSOL
" r.i _;~ CAN OF ENAMEI SPRAYEDTO
CONCLUSION
< ] DIRECTILYUPON
THE FLOOR. 1968. Left:
WeinerRealization
ofTHE
RESIDUE OF A FLARE IGNITED
~
:.
. _,~~~~ I for the
_i I l ~UPON A BOUNDARY,
Op Losse
'
desc rexhibition
Schroeven, Amsterdam,
1969. Courtesy
theartist.
Legend has it thatWeinerarticulatedthismodel aftera 1968 exhibitionat

WindhamCollege, Putney,Vermont,in whichhis project,an outdoor installation
of posts and strings,was destroyed-a situationthat led him to decide that the
"work"stillexistedas a basic structureor idea, regardlessof its materialstate. In
his book Statements (1968), Weiner lists a series of shortpast-participlephrases
describing possible uses of materials, many of which he had previouslycon-
structed;examples include One quartexterior greenenamelthrown on a brickwall,One
aerosolcan ofenamelsprayed toconclusion uponthefloor,Onestandarddyemarker
directly
thrown bystructured
intothesea,Afieldcratered simultaneous and A removal
TNT explosions,
tothelathingorsupportwallofplasterorwallboardfroma wall.37 A laterexample, The
residueofa flareignitedupona boundary, was realized on the Amsterdamcitybound-
aryforthe 1969 exhibitionOp LosseSchroeven. Language thuspermittedWeinerto
create workthatcould retainits identityacross multiplemanifestationsand that
was not subject to the uniqueness of the traditionalart object, whetherpainting
or sculpture.Weiner'stransitionfromthe Minimalist"specificobject" to linguistic
representation is similar to both the "event score" and Kosuth's "ideas." Yet
Weiner's works are also "sculptures" (since 1972, each piece is described as
"language + the materialsreferredto"). They have a basis in the proceduraluse of
materials,in doing thingswithobjects,thatlinksthemto post-Minimalist art.
As Kosuthhas argued,Weiner'sworkwithmaterialsaround 1967-68 poten-
tiallyallied him withpost-Minimalist artistslike Serra,Nauman, or BarryLeVa.38
37. Lawrence Weiner, Statements(New York: Seth Siegelaub/The Louis Kellner Foundation, 1968), n.p.
38. Kosuth even suggests that Weiner's early "process" pieces were a direct influence on Serra's
work, recounting: "I suppose that his [Weiner's] desire to lean toward conceptualization and lean away

20 OCTOBER
While Weiner would publicly deny any relation to "anti-form"works-"they are pri-
marilyconcerned with making objects for display-which has nothing to do with the
intent of mywork"-certain affinitiesbetween his early "Statements" and Serra's Verb
List (1967-68) suggest how Weiner's linguistically "performative" model emerged
from,and broke with, a more object-based notion of process.39 Serra's handwritten
list of more than one hundred procedures are mostlywrittenas infinitiveverbs: "to
roll, to crease, to fold, to store, to bend, to shorten, to twist...."40 First published in
Avalanchein 1971, they inevitablycall to mind the fiftyisolated verbs, presented in
the past participle, that Weiner published in his Traces(1970): "ignited, fermented,
displaced, transferred,breached, painted, smudged, flushed... "41Both artistswould
construct pieces that involved these material, sculptural processes-except that for
Weiner, the abstract formulation, in its continual openness to rearticulation, takes
precedence over the realization, however transitoryor compelling.42
frommaterializationhad in part to do with his failure to get the recognition he deserved for the
'process' or 'anti-form'pieces. (Robert Morrishas since told me thatWeinerwasn'tincluded in those
showsbecause he feltthatWeiner'sworkwas 'too pretentiousand gestural';althoughI took Morristo
Weiner's studio as early as November of 1968, and Richard Serra's liquid lead pieces came out of
Morris's transferof that information)" (Kosuth, "Influences: The DifferenceBetween 'How' and
'Why"'[1970], CollectedWritings, p. 81).
39. Weinerin Rose, "Four Interviews," p. 23.
40. RichardSerra,"VerbListCompilation,1967-68,"Avalanche2 (Winter1971), p. 20.
41. LawrenceWeiner,Tracce/Traces (Torino: Sperone editore,1970).
42. While Weineroftendismissesthe photographicdocumentationof his works-whetherin early
sculpturalenactmentsor in a wide rangeof installationand publicationformats-thecollectionof such
images in catalogs like LawrenceWeiner(Obras):En La Corriente/In TheStream(Valencia: IVAM, 1995)
nonethelessoffersan important viewofWeiner'sworkas itfunctionsin diversesettingsand contexts.
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Language BetweenPerformance
and Photography 21
In a 1977 interview, Serra described writingdown the verb list "as a wayof
applyingvarious to
activities unspecifiedmaterials.... The language structuredmy
activities in relation to materials which had the same function as transitiveverbs."43
Serra relatesthese sculpturalproceduresto drawing, because in both methodsthe
expressive dimension from
"results the act of doing"; elaborates,"The makingof
he
the formitself,whetherlead rollsor poles forthe PropPieces,was implied... within
the physicaltransformation of materialfromone stateto another."44 For Serra,this
emphasis on the not-fully-foreseeableresultsof physicalprocedures linked hisproject
to his friendRobertSmithson'sinterestsin site and entropy;both artistsexplored
beyondthe "closed systems" of Minimalistart that,in theirview,left"no room for
anything that could not substantiate a generalproposition."45
Unlike Kosuth's effortsto control signification,to "fix"ideas in dictionary
definitionsand self-enclosed,self-referential systems,Weiner's "statements"pro-
grammatically accept the inherent "abstraction" of language,the relativeinstability
of reference,and the capacityof utterancesto "signify" differentlyin each act of
enunciation. Paradoxically,Weiner relies upon reduction, since it is the most
Minimalstructuresthatpermitthe mostdiverseuses or realizations:"brokenoff,"
"to the sea," "over and under,""over and over...." As Schwarznotes, "If a piece
functionslinguistically, each performancewill draw its momentarysignificance
froma specificcontext. The more abstracta piece, the greaterits potential to
reach beyondthe present."46 It is thisopenness to the unanticipated,to the uncon-
trollable effectsof time, such as erosion and decay,that linksWeiner'swork to
post-Minimalistartistslike Smithson,Serra, and Nauman-and that marks the
reemergenceof Cagean models in the visualartof the late 1960s. In thisreengage-
ment with temporal and perceptual phenomena, a wide range of "conceptually
oriented"artistswould situatetheirexplorationsof process at least partlywithin
the space of representationalmedia-whether in Smithson'sphotographic"non-
sites,"Serra's films,or the videotaped performancesof Vito Acconci, Nauman,
Weiner,and manyothers.47This "performative" mode returnswitha difference-
no longerthe unique "live"performance,it reemergesmarkedbythe propertiesof
reproductivemedia,structurally subjectto inscription,iteration,and repetition.
43. RichardSerra,"AboutDrawing"(1977), RichardSerra:Interviews, Etc. 1970-1980 (Yonkers,N.Y:

Hudson RiverMuseum,1980), p. 77.
44. Ibid.
45. Richard Serra in "Interviewby Bernard Lamarche-Vadel"(1980), RichardSerra:Interviews, Etc.
1970-1980, p. 135.
46. DieterSchwarz,"MovedPictures:Film& Videos of LawrenceWeiner,"in Show& Tell:TheFilms&
VideoofLawrence A Catalogue
Weiner, Raisonne, ed. BartomeuMari (Gent:Imschoot,Uitgevers,1992),p. 96.
47. Serra's video Television
DeliversPeople(1973) is his only independent "word piece," composed
entirelyof language. The political analysisit offers,of individualviewersas the unwittingcommercial
"product"of mass-communications media, disallowsany meaningfulinterfacebetweenartisticprocesses
and the telecommunicationsindustry-perhapsmarkingthe end of the sixties-era"media optimism"
thatpropelled Conceptual artiststo engage withmass-mediaformsand techniques.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 04:54 02 April 2016
Emilio Prini, Camping, 1969, performance, . . . putting one brick on top of the other, cleaning a table, requires . . . intelli-
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1969 (photograph
gence of gesture; if well communicated, it can also become poetry.”36 In Zorio’s
provided by Stedelijk Museum).
work, the image of the tent elicits complex references. Nomadic dwellings repre-
The artist is the bending figure, second from right.
sent alternative ways of living; alternative lifestyles, however, still rely heavily on
knowledge acquired in the context of industrial societies and on the use of com-
mercially available materials.
The reference to nomadism is embedded in Tent at various levels. It is evident
in the iconographical reference, the embodiment of movement, the coexistence
of natural and artificial materials, and the appreciation of practical intelligence.
Zorio’s fellow Arte Povera colleague Emilio Prini used the tent in more literal
yet equally conceptual ways. In his piece Camping, he adopted the tent as a prop
for an action that took place in the context of the exhibition Op Losse Schroeven
(On Loose Screws) at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1969. As Christian
Rattemeyer has observed, “Prini arrived before the exhibition officially began
and pitched a number of tents in the parking lot across from the museum, from
36. Zorio, interview with the author, June 18, 2015. where he studied the progress of the organization and installation.”37 The artist’s
37. Christian Rattemeyer, “‘Op Losse Schroeven’
and ‘When Attitudes Become Form’ 1969,” in focus was on the performative connotation of the work. A list of complex actions,
Exhibiting the New Art (London: Afterall, 2010), 29. published by Germano Celant in Arte Povera = Art Povera in 1985, details ways of
38. Germano Celant, Arte Povera = Art Povera
(Milan: Electa, 1985), 106–7. Translation by Paul
delineating a circular space, choosing points within that circle, and pitching tents
Blanchard. at each point.38
71 artjournal
CAA_SU15_KH.indd 71 9/11/15 5:48 PM

In the previous two years Prini had been elaborating the idea of space-
making and reflecting on how space originates from actions. He created a series
of works titled Perimetro (Perimeter), which exemplify his research. Corinna
Criticos analyzes the 1967 piece Perimetro di piombo (Perimeter of Lead), initially
titled Perimetro d’aria (Perimeter of Air), noting that the work “consists of five piles
of lead sheets placed on the floor, one in the center, the others in each of the
four corners of the room. Each pile contains a fragment of a text reproduced on
the lead surface by serigraphy. The original text was a statement by the artist in
which he referred to his concerns at the time: concepts such as space, light, and
sound.”39 Prini induces the viewer to use her own body to define the space physi-
cally, while her mind is intent on defining the concept of space by reading the
artist’s reflections on the topic. Lead, which is often a metaphor of memory in
the context of Arte Povera, houses excerpts from the artist’s stream of thought.
The viewer is in charge of interpreting them; by being involved in the piece at
the mental and bodily levels, she becomes a protagonist of the work. Adachiara
Zevi clarifies that during the show Teatro della Mostre (Theater of Exhibitions) at
Rome’s Tartaruga Gallery in 1968, Perimetro also included another component. The
artist occasionally read the names of the people he had met during his trip from
Genoa to the gallery in Rome. The names were written in blue on wood pieces
that he collected in a burlap sack.40 The action recognized the role of the artist’s
travel, whose specificity was measured by his encounters on the road. He had
himself delineated a space simply by moving from one city to another in order to
attend the show. A year later, his trip to Amesterdam for Op Losse Schroeven is in and
of itself a work of art, an action that outlines a space. This approach mirrors the
nomadic practice of wandering about a habitat, which is itself defined by the
nomad’s itinerary.
The reference to nomadism in Camping is emblematic, given the use of tents
as the most visible element of the work. According to Celant, Prini photographed
Italian artists such as Marisa Merz, Paolo Icaro, Pier Paolo Calzolari, and himself
in front of the tents.41 Zorio recalls Prini entering a tent in the middle of a road
maintenance zone in front of the Stedelijk, where young construction workers
were laboring. The tent covered some of their tools.42 While on site, Prini would
engage in dialogue with the artists and the workers, and the tent became a frame
for this interaction. The piece was extemporaneous, open-ended, and site-
specific.43 Prini remained outside the institutional space of the Stedelijk Museum,
39. Corinna Criticos, “Reading Arte Povera,” in thus expanding the museum’s perimeter outside its walls.44 He refused to move
Zero to Infinity, 86. in centripetal patterns, that is, converging toward the museum, and instead
40. Adachiara Zevi, Peripezie del dopoguerra
nell’arte italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 2006), 313.
decentered the cultural activity from within the museum to the public space. In
41. Germano Celant, Arte Povera: Storia e Storie this sense, he obtained a nomadic effect, parallel to the aforementioned dynamic
(Milan: Electa, 2011), 288–89.
discussed by de Radkowski in “We the Nomads?.” Instead of designating one site
42. Zorio, interview with the author, June 18, 2015.
43. See Wim Beeren, “The Exhibition” (1969), rep. as the center, as sedentary residents do, the nomad establishes a variety of sites
Exhibiting the New Art, 125. that consequently lose their centrality. Prini’s Camping multiplies the nodes of
44. A text related to Prini’s Camping (published in
Celant, Arte Povera = Art Povera, 107) mentions the cultural production and questions the authority of the museum as a demarcated
following actions: “Later, through topographical place closed off to those extraneous to the art world. His interaction with the
correspondence bring the perimeter of the camp
into the stairway-entrance of the museum and put construction workers, artists, and passersby signifies the possibility of involving
microtelephones on the ceiling in correspondence the “man in the street” in the construction of the art discourse. This piece can be
to the points of the tents.” Subsequent accounts
of the piece omit descriptions of this phase of the
seen as nomadic also in the sense attributed to the term by Deleuze and Guattari,
performance. who identified nomadism with a drive for change, an instinctual attitude toward
72 SUMMER 2015
CAA_SU15_KH.indd 72 9/11/15 5:48 PM

Emilio Prini, detail of Camping showing the crossing of given limits.45 The authors posit nomadism as a rhizomatic,
the artist in front of one of the tents, 1969,
dynamic, and nonhierarchical organism, which is inherent to the “war machine”
performance, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam,
1969 (photograph provided by Stedelijk Museum) and in dialectical opposition to the state; the state represents a vertical power
structure, given the coexistence in it of nomos and myth, of written laws and com-
mon values. By tactically and constantly attacking the limits of the state, the “war
machine” pushes for changes that will be selectively adopted by the state as a
means to ultimately reinforce its own structure.46 Hayes Williams draws parallels
between the writing of Deleuze/Guattari and selected Arte Povera works.47 She
also remarks that the reading of Arte Povera as a way to undermine existing hier-
archies is evident in Celant’s text “Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerilla War,” which
examines ideas of unsystematic resistance.48
The concept of nomadism in contrast with the status quo is also apparent
45. See Eugene W. Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s in the work of young designers and architects operating in the late 1960s and
“A Thousand Plateaus”: A Reader’s Guide (New
early 1970s. In a text published in the catalogue for the 1972 exhibition Italy: The
York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 4–5.
46. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, New Domestic Landscape, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Celant called
351–423. them the “Radical Architects.”49 If the Poveristi employed the image of the
47. Hayes Williams, “Nomadologies.”
48. See Germano Celant, “Arte Povera, Appunti nomadic dwelling as a tool to convey critical interpretations of culture and soci-
per una guerriglia,” Flash Art 5 (November– ety, the Radicals went so far as to orchestrate systematic utopias based on the
December 1967): 3.
49. Germano Celant, “Radical Architecture,” in very ideal of mobility. Mostly based in Florence, groups such as Superstudio,
Italy: The New Domestic Landscape; Achievements Archizoom, UFO, and Group 9999 rebelled against the modernist obsession with
and Problems of Italian Design, ed. Emilio Ambasz,
exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
the finished project to be manufactured on the assembly line and purchased by
1972), 380–404. an uncritical mass of consumers.
73 artjournal
CAA_SU15_KH.indd 73 9/11/15 5:48 PM

Jacopo Galimberti
10 Piero Gilardi, Montagna wood implements which materialized Pascali’s primitivist conviction that ‘when
(Mountain), 1967. Expanded
polyurethane, 300 × 300 × 800 black people make objects they create a civilization’.107
cm. Flaine: Private Collection.
Photo: © Piero Gilardi.
Sonnabend’s hostility obliged Gilardi to come to terms with the vexata quaestio of
artistic freedom in capitalist society. He decided to suspend the production of objects
11 Piero Gilardi, Carriola
(Wheelbarrow), 1967. Mixed and travelled to America, Amsterdam and Stockholm, becoming an original artist-
media, 60 × 70 × 120 cm. Work critic-art correspondent of a type that can be retrospectively ascribed to conceptual
now lost. Photo: © Piero
Gilardi. art.108 He became familiar with the work of artists such as Dennis Oppennheim,
12 Pino Pascali, Attrezzi
Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Long, and those of the Bay Area. The discoveries
agricoli (Agricultural tools), he made during these journeys were recounted in his articles published in three
1968. Hay, metal and wood,
dimensions variable. Rome: languages in Arts Magazine, Bit, Flash Art, Pallone, Pianeta Fresco, Quindici, and Rohbo. Gilardi
Galleria nazionale d’arte recommended a trip to the Bay Area, owing to the political preoccupations of its
moderna e contemporanea
(courtesy of the Ministero artists whom he deemed closer to Europeans.109 He also worked through the notion
per i Beni e le Attività of ‘microemotive art’, searching for a common denominator for artists including
Culturali). Photo: © Giuseppe
Schiavinotto. Bruce Nauman, Merz, Long, Morris or Irving Shaw.110
In 1968, Gilardi realized that the works variously labelled ‘“anti-form art”,
“process-art”, “earth-works”, and “arte povera”’ become increasingly ‘accepted
by the establishment’.111 At the same time he was fascinated by the emergence of
social movements which he considered to be inspired by the same values as these
works, but more convincingly rejecting the lures of the ‘system’. On the model of the
© Association of Art Historians 2013 435

Germano Celant’s Invention of Arte Povera
Parisian Atelier Populaire, he put art at the service of the movement, making political
posters in his studio. By and large, in 1968 he still believed in a ‘horizontal plane’,
in a ‘“proximity” of art and politics’ distinct from the ‘vertical logic’ that he noticed
in Marcuse’s interventions.112 However, in the latter part of the year the artist went
through a series of experiences that radicalized his position. Being one of the few
with first-hand knowledge of the pioneering European and North American artists
who had emerged since 1966–67, Gilardi played a key role in organizing two
landmark exhibitions: Op Losse Schroeven and Live in your Head: When Attitudes Become Forms.113
While in the former Wim Beeren acknowledged his endeavours and published his
text in the catalogue, in the Swiss exhibition Harald Szeemann and Gilardi had a
disagreement. The show was initially supposed to give artists a major role in its
organization, thus evoking the claim to self-management coming from the protest
movement. However, Gilardi has recalled: ‘at the last minute, using the sponsor’s
claims (Philip Morris) as an excuse, [Szeemann] went back on his promise and
arranged the show with the New York commercial apparatus, chiefly Leo Castelli’.
114
This occurred while the artists and gallery-owners tied to arte povera were gaining
an increasingly dominant position in Turin. In Gilardi’s view the ‘Sperone entourage’
was taking hold of the Deposito d’arte presente (warehouse of contemporary art), a
showcase anticipating Szeemann’s and Beeren’s proposals, that he had struggled to
keep semi-public.115 Although Gilardi had originally been a fervent supporter of the
Deposito, in 1969 he and a group of activists stormed into it and damaged its facilities
in order to make manifest their dissent regarding the institution’s policies.116 Among
them was Ugo Nespolo, author of Molotov (plate 13), a work that provocatively engaged
with the idea of an art in the service of the protest movement.
Gilardi’s letter to Bonfiglioli and Boarini illustrates his thoughts in January 1969.
The artist went through his work after Celant sent him a ‘sort of private Arte Povera
manifesto’ in October 1967.117 He recounted the gradual commercialization of arte
povera, whose association of diverse artists was, he opined, a mystification made
in the interest of Celant, Sperone, and Sonnabend. From his Marxist perspective
American chauvinism was by now aware of Europe’s role in implementing a ‘true
cultural imperialism’; arte povera was simply the fruit of this overture. In the same
letter he set out his aims: ‘participating in the revolutionary totality via grass-roots
13 Ugo Nespolo, Molotov,

1968. Mixed media, 600 × 200
× 150 cm. Work destroyed.
Photo: © Ugo Nespolo.
© Association of Art Historians 2013 436

3
Conceptual Art and/as Philosophy
peter osborne
It is difficult to bungle a good idea.

Sol LeWitt
Nothing marks the gulf separating the Conceptual art of the late 1960s
and early 1970s from its post- and neo-Conceptual progeny of today more
strikingly than their respective relationships to philosophy. Indeed, one
might be tempted to claim that it is in the intimacy of its relationship with
philosophy – an intimacy at times verging on complete identification –
that the specificity of Conceptual art resides, were its formation not so
multiple and complex, despite its relatively brief life, as to refuse any such
straightforward definition. Philosophy has been deployed too often as a
weapon in the wars between Conceptual artists to be used unproblemat-
ically either as one of the criteria for the conceptuality of a work or as a
neutral medium for debate about it. In this respect, even to raise the ques-
tion of the relationship of Conceptual art to philosophy as an issue
through which to re-examine the idea of Conceptual art is already to
court the danger of situating oneself on one particular side of a series of
factional divides. Yet it is precisely here, I shall argue, in its divisive,
polemical role within the Conceptual art community, that the importance
of philosophy for Conceptual art lies, including its less explicitly or
directly philosophical manifestations.
The very formulation of the problem is peculiar. For what does it mean
to specify or delimit a particular kind of art with reference to its determ-
ination by another cultural field? Not a particular position within that
field, it would seem – a particular philosophy – let alone a particular phi-
losophy of art, but philosophy itself, philosophy as such. What does ‘phi-
losophy’ stand for here? Pure conceptuality, pure thought, pure reason,
perhaps? Or the historically developed and institutionally structured
space of philosophical positions and possibilities which make up the pro-
fessional field of philosophical production, at any particular time, in any
48 peter osborne
particular place, in Bourdieu’s sociological sense of the term?1 Certainly,

there were (and are) Conceptual artists with highly invested, if deeply
ambivalent, relationships to the discourses of professional philosophy;
while others remained oblivious to its charms. Yet either way, whether the
idea of philosophy is broadly or narrowly construed, the determination
of a mode of artistic production by a philosophical form would seem to
place it in opposition, in principle, to the established conception of ‘art’
in its modern European sense as sensuous particularity or aesthetic, bug-
bear of the Western philosophical imagination since Plato.2
This is, of course, the point: the shock, the scandal, the attractiveness
and the enduring radicalism of the idea. Conceptual art is not just
another particular kind of art, in the sense of a further specification of an
existing genus, but an attempt at a fundamental redefinition of art as
such, a transformation of its genus: a transformation in the relationship
of sensuousness to conceptuality within the ontology of the artwork
which challenges its definition as the object of a specifically ‘aesthetic’
(that is, ‘non-conceptual’) or quintessentially ‘visual’ experience.
Conceptual art was an attack on the art object as the site of a look. That
Conceptual art appears now as one particular kind of art among others is
testimony to the fact that its moment has passed, that its challenge has
faded. That a large amount of the art amidst which it appears differently
from the way in which art appeared before Conceptual art attests to its
enduring effect. Moreover, that both the intension (meaning) and the
extension (reference) of the term ‘Conceptual art’ remain so hotly dis-
puted registers the fact that there is unfinished business here to conduct.3
Part of this business concerns the precise sense in which Conceptual art
might be said to be a specifically ‘philosophical’ art; indeed, in which all
art after Duchamp (or at least, after the renewed reception of Duchamp in
the 1960s – ‘Duchamp’ is largely a retrospective effect of the 1960s) might
be said to be distinctively ‘philosophical’ in nature.4
It is important in this respect to distinguish two different levels at
which disputes about the relationship between Conceptual art and phi-
losophy have been conducted: the level at which those advocating an
expansive, empirically diverse and historically inclusive use of the term
‘Conceptual art’ confront the champions of narrower, analytically more
restricted, and explicitly ‘philosophical’ definitions; and the lower – and
often more heated – level at which the latter dispute among themselves
about the precise character of such definitions and the meaning and
implications of their related practices and inquiries. I shall refer to those
who advocate an expansive, empirically diverse and historically inclusive
Conceptual Art and/as Philosophy 49
use of the term ‘Conceptual art’ (such as Sol LeWitt) as inclusive or weak
Conceptualists. I shall call those championing more restricted, analyti-
cally focused and explicitly philosophical definitions (such as Kosuth and
the British group Art & Language) exclusive or strong Conceptualists.
Exclusive or strong Conceptualists have tended to hog the critical lime-
light, for two reasons: first, because of the categorial extremism of their
positions (they push hardest against the limits of the established notion of
art); second, because of the affinity of their artistic practices to the prac-
tice of criticism. The relationship between Conceptual art and philo-
sophical discourse in the USA and Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s
was dynamic, wild and not infrequently paradoxical. That there was a
relationship at all was the result of changes in the relations between art
practice and art criticism which took place in the first half of the 1960s,
prior to the emergence of Conceptual art, strictly speaking, as a self-
conscious form. On the one hand, these changes were an integral part of
the development (and crisis) of Greenbergian Modernist criticism in its
interaction with new – especially ‘Minimalist’ – work. On the other hand,
they were an effect of broader changes in educational provision, the social
function of the arts and politics in advanced capitalist societies. They
involved both an increasing emphasis within art-critical discourse upon
definitional questions about the essential nature or legitimate form of art-
works, and a growing willingness on the part of artists themselves to
engage in such discourse, both as a productive resource for practice and as
a means of maintaining control over the representation of their projects
within the art world. This quickly led to an erosion of the division of
labour between critic and artist which had emerged in Europe during the
second half of the nineteenth century and had been consolidated into the
professional practices of the US art world in the period immediately fol-
lowing the Second World War. Its most radical effect was an expansion in
the notion of art practice (and hence, the artwork) to include – at its limit
– the products of all of the artist’s art-related activities.
The crisis of Greenbergian criticism (essentially a crisis in its medium-
based conception of the artwork, its ‘specific’ Modernism) thus simulta-
neously registered a crisis in the ontology of the artwork and established
the conditions for the resolution of this crisis through the renovation of
the romantic ideology of artistic intentionality in a radically new, critical-
discursive guise. Philosophy was the means for this usurpation of critical
power by a new generation of artists; the means by which they could
simultaneously address the crisis of the ontology of the artwork (through
an art-definitional conception of their practice) and achieve social con-
50 peter osborne
trol over the meaning of their work. As such, Conceptual art represents a
radical attempt to realign two hitherto independent domains of the cul-
tural field: artistic production and philosophical production. More
specifically, it involved an attempt directly to transfer the cultural author-
ity of the latter to the former, thereby both bypassing and trumping exist-
ing forms of art-critical discourse. In this respect, Conceptual art is a
classic example of strategic position-taking within a regional domain of
the cultural field (‘art’), aimed at a redistribution of the positions consti-
tuting that domain as a relational structure of possible actions.5
The discursive conditions for this transference of cultural authority
were established by Greenberg, in the idea of Modernist art as a self-
critical art which explores the definition of its medium. (This notion of
self-criticism was already an explicitly philosophical idea, borrowed directly
from Kant’s Critique of Reason.) The social conditions lay in the expan-
sion and transformation of art education during the 1960s, in a context of
growing cultural and political radicalism. The generation of New York
artists who came to prominence in the 1960s were the first group of artists
to have attended university. Their reaction against the anti-intellectualism
of the prevailing ideology of the art world – which was at once a reaction
against its social conservatism – was profound. The result was a double-
coding of ‘philosophy’ across the two cultural fields – artistic and philo-
sophical – which introduced a constitutive ambiguity into the position of
philosophy within the artistic field itself. Thus, on the one hand, philoso-
phy functions within the artistic field as a specific form of artistic or criti-
cal material or productive resource for a practice the logic of which is
supposedly autonomous or immanently artistic. On the other hand, phi-
losophy retains its own immanent criteria of intellectual adequacy as
itself a relatively autonomous cultural practice. That is, one may judge
the adequacy of the philosophical ideas in play in the art world both
‘strictly philosophically’ and from the standpoint of their contribution to
the transformation of artistic practices. The idea of Conceptual art, in
the exclusive or strong sense, is the regulative fantasy that these two sets of
criteria might become one. The practice of strong Conceptualism was the
experimental investigation – the concrete elaboration through practice –
of the constitutive ambiguity produced by this founding double-coding.
Only a certain kind of philosophy could have played this role: namely,
an analytical philosophy which combined the classical cultural authority
of philosophy, in the updated guise of a philosophical scientism (logico-
linguistic analysis) with a purely second-order or meta-critical concep-
tion of its epistemological status. For only a meta-critical conception of
philosophy allows for the recoding of ‘art’ as ‘philosophy’ while leaving

its artistic status intact; rather than, like Hegel (or Danto), presenting
them as competing modes of representation and hence conceiving of
Conceptual art as the end of art, to the precise extent to which it involves
art becoming philosophical.6 ‘Art after philosophy’, in Kosuth’s sense, is
very different from ‘art after the end of art’ in Danto’s, despite their
apparent similarities. The scientistic self-image of such philosophy was a
crucial factor in the cultural logic of the exchange. For Anglo-American
analytical philosophy offered a radically different art-educational ideal,
and with it a new image of the artist as an intellectually rigorous creator;
more intellectual, in fact, than the increasingly beleaguered critic who
would aspire to pass judgement on the meaning of the work. Such an
image was at once a challenge to the prevailing image of the artist as an
creative individual and cultural outsider and the means for its reconstruc-
tion on newly intellectual grounds. For the romantic sense of outsider-
dom could be displaced on to the otherness of philosophy to the
prevailing art world and art-educational culture, allowing for the repro-
duction of certain characteristically ‘artistic’ (and often distinctively gen-
dered) traits in the medium of their negation of the established form. In
the British context, this dynamic was subsequently reinforced by the intel-
lectual and political culture of Marxism, within which the image of the
artist-as-political-activist was overlaid upon that of the artist-as-
philosopher to produce a new (and often self-righteous) version of the
artist-as-outsider. The artist-as-outsider became the artist-outside-of-
‘art’.
The structure of this rich and contradictory relationship between an
art calling itself ‘Conceptual’ and philosophical discourse in the USA and
Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s may be traced, schematically,
through the escalating philosophical investments of three canonic figures:
Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth and the British group Art & Language. This
procedure should not be taken to imply that these are the most important
Conceptual artists of their day; or that their work is in some way arche-
typical of Conceptual art more generally. It is not. Rather, these are the
figures in whose work the question of the relationship of Conceptual art
to philosophy stands out in sharpest relief. Any more comprehensive elab-
oration of the notion of Conceptual art will need to situate this aspect of
its history in relation to a much wider set of determinants.7 Which is not
say that such an elaboration might not itself be, ultimately, philosophical
in form. LeWitt, Kosuth and Art & Language represent three degrees of
investment of Conceptual art in ‘philosophy’. A brief comparison of the
52 peter osborne
form and effects of these investments will lead us towards a provisional

judgement on the significance of philosophy for the idea of Conceptual
art.
p h i l o s o p h y d e g r e e z e ro : s o l l e w i t t
As a movement, Conceptual art is conveniently dated from the publica-
tion of Sol LeWitt’s ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ in Artforum in the
summer of 1967. Lewitt’s essay was not the first to identify a particular
kind of art as distinctively Conceptual: an art in which ‘the idea or con-
cept is the most important part of the work’.8 The Fluxus artist Henry
Flynt had written about concept art – ‘of which the material is concepts
as the material of e.g. music is sound’ – several years previously, in 1961.9
Indeed, in George Maciunas’s ‘Genealogical Chart of Fluxus’ (1968),
Flynt is credited with formulating the idea as early as 1954. However, it
was only with LeWitt’s ‘Paragraphs’ that the idea achieved an extended
critical thematization, and it was via LeWitt’s ‘Paragraphs’ that it took
hold in the US art world as a unifying framework for the self-understand-
ing of an emergent body of work. One reason for this was the breadth and
inclusivity of LeWitt’s construction of the category, in contrast to the
proliferation of more restricted, lower-level critical terms, such as
‘Minimalism’ (derived from ‘Minimal art’, coined by Richard Wolheim in
1965), ‘primary structures, reductive, rejective, cool, and mini-art’, all of
which LeWitt explicitly rejected as ‘part of the secret language that art
critics use when communicating with each other through the medium of
art magazines’.10 LeWitt’s theorization is an exemplary defence of the
standpoint of the artist against the critic, within the medium of criticism.
However, if LeWitt’s essay marks the beginning of Conceptual art as a
movement – however variegated and diffuse – it nonetheless reflects on
the structure of an existing set of practices which had previously been
understood in a variety of alternative ways. (LeWitt is still predominantly
categorized as a Minimalist, in fact.) In this respect, it is a transitional text
and LeWitt is a transitional figure. ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ is a
distillation of the immanent logic of an object-producing, though not
object-based, practice which evolved, primarily, through the exploration
of the effects of self-regulating series and systems of rules for decision-
making about the production of objects out of preformed materials. As
Robert Morris put it, ‘Permuted, progressive, symmetrical organisations
have a dualistic character in relation to the matter they distribute. . . .
[They] separate . . . from what is physical by making relationships them-
selves another order of facts’.11 For Morris, who retained a Greenbergian
notion of truth to materials, this was problematic. For LeWitt, on the

other hand, art was a privileged means of access to this other order of
facts which cannot be accessed directly in the same way. This explains the
limited role attributed by the text to philosophy: ‘Conceptual art doesn’t
really have much to do with mathematics, philosophy or any other mental
discipline . . . The philosophy of the work is implicit in the work and is
not an illustration of any system of philosophy.’12 Nor was LeWitt’s
Conceptualism linguistic in orientation. Flynt had argued that ‘since con-
cepts are closely bound up with language, concept art is a kind of art of
which the material is language’.13 But LeWitt’s art ideas were as much
numerical as linguistic. He would thus maintain the independently criti-
cal, rather than artistic, status of his analysis of Conceptual art, despite
his famous insistence that ‘the idea itself, even if not made visual, is as
much a work of art as any finished product’.14 ‘These sentences comment
on art,’ his later ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ (1969) concludes, ‘but are
not art.’15 The idea here is the idea of a work of art; not a second-order
idea about what a work of art is. The latter is criticism, which, though it
may contribute to the production of an art idea, is not one itself as such.
In so far as there is philosophy in LeWitt, then, it is in his art and his criti-
cism in qualitatively distinct forms.
Still, despite its origins in his own artistic practice, the idea of
Conceptual art outlined in ‘Paragraphs’ had implications far beyond any-
thing Lewitt was himself producing as art at the time. ‘Conceptual’ in
comparison to certain other, superficially similar, works also often
labelled ‘Minimalist’ (by Morris, for example), LeWitt’s art appears as no
more than ‘proto-Conceptual’ when set beside later, more single-mindedly
conceptual work. One reason for this is that, despite his gestures in the
direction of a purely ideational interpretation of the artwork, LeWitt is
actually ambivalent about object-hood. On the one hand, while declaring
the look of a work to be its least important feature, and thereby down-
grading its physicality in relation to its idea, the essay nonetheless contin-
ues to treat the work’s physical reality as a condition of its existence: ‘It is
the process of conception and realization with which the artist is con-
cerned.’ On the other hand, the remark that ‘the idea itself, even if not
made visual, is as much a work of art as any finished product’ suggests that
the physical reality of the work is not merely unimportant, but optional.
But this is misleading, for LeWitt continues, ‘All intervening steps – scrib-
bles, sketches, drawing, failed work, models, studies, thoughts, conversa-
tions – are of interest. Those that show the thought process of the artist are
sometimes more interesting than the final product’.16
54 peter osborne
What this reveals is that LeWitt is not really thinking ontologically

about art’s object-hood here at all; even if we consider the object inten-
tionalistically, as an idea. Rather, more simply, he is concerned to valorize
the intellectual element of the process of its production, which he associ-
ates, psychologistically, with the workings of the artist’s mind. What
looks like an exclusively ideational redefinition of the object, in conflict
with the recognition that it requires some physical presence, is actually,
more restrictively (and also, perhaps, more materialistically), a psycho-
logical one: ‘A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the
artist’s mind to the viewer’s.’ LeWitt’s proto-Conceptualist Minimalism
is thus both ontologically dualistic (idea and object inhabit different
realms) and a variant of Realism in its understanding of ideas as mental
events. This explains his distance from the predominantly anti-psycholo-
gistic forms of logico-linguistic analysis which would preoccupy later
Conceptualists. Conceptual art, for LeWitt, is not theoretical but ‘intu-
itive’ – for all the apparent formalism of the ideas behind his own work. It
is for this reason that he insists upon the ‘mystical’ rather than the ‘ratio-
nalistic’ character of such art, describing it as constituted by ‘illogical
judgements’.17 Thus, while LeWitt may have pushed Modernist reduction
one stage further than Judd (from reduction to ‘medium’ to reduction to
‘object-hood’ to reduction to ‘idea’), his psychological realism forbids the
strictly Conceptual reading of ‘art as idea’ which his ‘Paragraphs’ none-
theless inevitably evokes. It is thus not surprising that LeWitt would soon
be challenged by a more exclusive, more formally philosophical, type of
Conceptualism laying claim to the idea of ‘art as idea’ as its own.
It would be a mistake, though, to distinguish LeWitt from these later
Conceptualists on the basis of the philosophical resources they deployed
alone. Adrian Piper, a staunch defender of an inclusive LeWittian
Conceptualism, not only went on to study analytical philosophy, but
became a professional philosopher, while continuing her career as an
artist. However, she did not thereby become what I am calling a strong or
an exclusive Conceptualist. For while she used (and continues to use) her
philosophical work in her art – often making work directly about her
philosophical reflections – her philosophical interests are not in the con-
cept of art itself, but in the broader metaphysical notions of space, time
and selfhood, the experience of which her art explores. (Initially, in a for-
mal LeWittian manner; subsequently, in more social and political con-
texts, characterized by her interests in feminism and the politics of race.)
For this LeWittian strand of Conceptualism, it is the infinite plurality of
media that the idea of Conceptual art opens up which is the point, not the
Adrian Piper, Catalysis III (street performance), August 1970.

56 peter osborne
exploration of that idea itself, directly, as art. As Piper puts it, ‘If we have
to be concerned with one particular concept to be a conceptualist, some-
thing’s gone badly wrong!’18 Lewitt never considers the relationship
between the ideational and physical aspects of the object, ontologically,
in its specific character as ‘art’. Indeed, the concept of art, as such, in its
generality, plays little role in his thought. The distinctive feature of
Kosuth’s brand of analytical or strong Conceptualism, on the other hand,
is its exclusive focus on the concept of art: its reductively art-definitional
or definitively philosophical conception of art practice. It is at this point
that a quite general engagement with art as a practice of manifest ideas
(and hence only a very broad alignment of art with philosophy, as a disci-
pline of conceptual ideality, like mathematics) is transformed into a par-
ticular engagement between modernist criticism (with its concern for the
self-critical dimension of art as an autonomous practice) and a determi-
nate state of the Anglo-American philosophical field.
f i rs t- d e g r e e p h i l o s o p h y: jo s e p h ko s u t h
Lewitt’s essay established the discursive conditions for Kosuth’s formul-
ation of his own ideas about Conceptual art, but these owe more to
Duchamp and Reinhardt than to LeWitt himself. They owe most of all
to A. J. Ayer. Kosuth’s Conceptualism takes up the functionalism of
Duchamp’s meta-artistic interventions and, discarding their residual
anti-art negativity, reinterprets them in terms of a new linguistic posi-
tivism. It thereby extends the ‘linguistic turn’ characteristic of post-war
Anglo-American philosophy into the field of artistic production in an
ostensibly rigorous manner.
Being an artist now means to question the nature of art . . . The function of art as
a question, was first raised by Marcel Duchamp . . . The event that made conceiv-
able the realization that it was possible to ‘speak another language’ and still make
sense in art was Marcel Duchamp’s first unassisted readymade. With the unas-
sisted readymade, art changed its focus from the form of the language to what
was being said. Which means that it changed the nature of art from a question of
morphology to a question of function. This change – one from ‘appearance’ to
‘conception’ – was the beginning of ‘modern’ art and the beginning of ‘concep-
tual’ art. All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists
conceptually. ... Artists question the nature of art by presenting new propositions
as to art’s nature.19
So runs the famous passage in ‘Art After Philosophy’, the serial essay first
published in Studio International in 1969, in which Kosuth set out his stall
for a purely conceptual art. In it we find a transition from the negative

questioning inherent in the aesthetic indifference of Duchamp’s ready-
mades to the positive ‘investigations’ of Kosuth’s distinct brand of
Conceptual art: a transition from the wide-eyed surprise of ‘This is art?’
to a new way of claiming ‘This is art.’
Kosuth transformed the abstract negation of the aesthetic conception
of art performed by the anti-art element of Duchamp’s ready-made into a
determinate negation. He thereby transformed the indeterminacy of
Duchamp’s generic conception of art into the determinacy of a new posi-
tivity: ‘propositions as to art’s nature’. Kosuth’s ‘pure’ or ‘theoretical’
Conceptual art aspires to make a new conceptual positivity out of
Duchamp’s negations. As such it is dependent upon a quite particular phi-
losophy of language.20
The institutional conditions for this radical transcoding were estab-
lished in the long, slow process of the reception of Duchamp’s works into
the art institution: in particular, the direct designation as ’art’ of an object
which had become so only as the result of a complex series of events sur-
rounding its previous rejection (Fountain) – what we might call the posi-
tivization of the ready-made – in conjunction with a whole array of new
artistic developments which had taken place in reaction to American-type
painting, involving a massive expansion of artistic means. This process
effected a separation of two elements hitherto conjoined in the founding
conflation of formalist Modernism: aestheticism and autonomy. The
former was rejected; the latter embraced. Duchamp’s attack on the aes-
thetic definition of art was recouped within the institution by a generic
conception of art which retained the notion of autonomy. Kosuth had
already encountered a similar notion of autonomy within Modernism, in
Ad Reinhardt’s understanding of monochrome painting as ‘art as art’. In
the wake of LeWitt’s essay, Duchamp’s ready-mades were interpreted by
Kosuth as an inversion of the logic of Reinhardt’s understanding of
monochrome painting: from the idea of ‘art as art’ to ‘art as idea (as
idea)’.21 The crucial doubling registers the artistic enactment of the meta-
artistic idea.
Kosuth received Duchamp’s ready-made into the context of
Reinhardt’s Modernist idea of art as autonomous and hence self-referen-
tial. This is the second of the great conflations of formalist Modernism,
separated out by Kosuth from the first (the conflation of aestheticism and
autonomy) and in this case maintained: the conflation of autonomy
and self-referentiality. Ayer’s logical positivist philosophy of language
provided Kosuth with the means to think self-referentiality without the
58 peter osborne
aesthetic. The positivism of Kosuth’s understanding of Conceptual art is

a consequence of the dual context of his joint reception of Duchamp’s
work and LeWitt’s essay: Reinhardt and logical positivism. For whereas
Duchamp had maintained, ’There doesn’t have to be a lot of the concep-
tual for me to like something. What I don’t like is the completely noncon-
ceptual, which is purely retinal; that irritates me’22 – just as LeWitt had
described the concept as no more than ‘the most important aspect’ of a
Conceptual work – Kosuth and others came to aspire to the completely,
autonomously and self-referentially, conceptual: ’new propositions as to
art’s nature’.
Works of art are analytical propositions. That is, if viewed within their context –
as art – they provide no information whatsoever about any matter of fact. A work
of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist’s intention, that is, he
is saying that a 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’).
For Kosuth, Conceptual art is an art which recognizes that ‘art’s “art con-
dition” is a conceptual state’ – that is, that ‘objects are conceptually irrel-
evant to the condition of art’. It is an art which is ‘clearly conceptual in
intent’.23
‘Art After Philosophy’ is one of the more technically confused philo-
sophical statements about art. Yet it is exemplary – indeed, constitutive –
in its illusion. In particular, it is an excellent illustration of the depen-
dence of analytical or strong conceptual art upon specific (often highly
problematic, but also inadvertently socially representative) philosophical
standpoints: in Kosuth’s case, the triumphant linguistic reductivism of a
now long-discredited logical positivism. The propositional positivism of
Kosuth’s idea of art derives directly from A. J. Ayer, whose writings pro-
vided the medium for the translation of the formalist idea of autonomy as
self-referentiality into the idiom of the analytical proposition. (After
Wittgenstein, Kosuth assures us, ‘“Continental” philosophy need not
seriously be considered’.24) At the same time, however, this propositional
positivism is combined with a psychological positivism stemming from
Kosuth’s individualistic reading of Duchamp’s nominalism – similar in
many ways to Lewitt’s stress on intentionality. For while the semantic pos-
itivity of Kosuth’s idea of art appears to move decisively beyond LeWitt’s
psychologism, it is in fact held back, and tied to it, by his inflated concep-
tion of the stipulative power of the individual artist: art as ‘a presentation
of the artist’s intention’. It is this combination which leads to the
exaggeration of the cultural authority of the artist’s critical discourse,

characteristic of a certain sectarian Conceptualism; an exaggeration
which is at once theoretical, strategic and opportunistic. It took the ulti-
mate form of the attempt to efface the categorial difference between art
and criticism in the polemical presentation of critical discourse as itself
art, in the journal Art-Language, for example. There are thus three main
components of Kosuth’s conception: linguistic reduction, psychologism
and the collapse of the distinction between art and criticism.
Kosuth’s self-understanding is marked by a fundamental equivocation
about language. In search of an anti-aestheticist model for artistic auton-
omy, Kosuth hit upon the analogy of tautology: ‘art is analogous to an
analytical proposition.’ However, he lacked the resources to think the
analogical and this soon collapsed into identity: ‘Works of art are analyt-
ical propositions.’25 Kosuth thus simultaneously introduced and fore-
closed the issue of the semiological character of visual art, by abstracting
from all questions of medium, form, visuality and materiality, while
nonetheless continuing to pose them, implicitly, in his presumption of
art’s difference from other forms of signification. This is not a presump-
tion that Kosuth has ever been able to redeem, theoretically. Yet this was in
part his point: as the heir to empiricism, linguistic philosophy is anti-
metaphysical, and philosophy of art was to be no exception. Rather than
philosophy delineating art’s realm, this was to be the job of art itself, in
each instance, ‘presenting new propositions as to art’s nature’. By pre-
senting different visual means of signifying the same propositional con-
tent, Kosuth’s early works aim to demonstrate the independence of
conceptual content from signifying form, in such a way as to make this
show of independence into a (independent) propositional content of its
own: Art as Idea as Idea. But what allows for these objects to be read in
this way: as presentations of propositions about art’s nature?
It is at this point that Kosuth’s propositional positivism starts to break
down. For in his account, an individual work of art – a material object –
becomes ‘a kind of proposition’ within ‘art’s language’ (rather than an
object of aesthetic appreciation or a cultural object of some other kind)
only when it is presented within what he calls ‘the context of art’.26 Yet the
model of meaning to which the idea of an analytical proposition is tied is
resolutely anti-contextual. The early Kosuth was thus forced to neutralize
the contextualism in his own position in order to preserve the semantic
purity of his Conceptualism. This is the function of his psychologism and
the associated regression to the prioritization of artistic intention. For
Kosuth, ‘the context of art’ (so rich in Duchamp) is reduced to no more
60 peter osborne
than a space set aside for the realization of the artist’s intention.
Ultimately, it is the artist’s intention that the work be understood as ‘a
comment on art’ which makes it ‘art’.
‘This is a Portrait of Iris Clert if I say so’, reads the famous telegram
sent by Robert Rauschenberg to his dealer, Iris Clert, in 1961, as his con-
tribution to an exhibition of portraits – simultaneously enacting and par-
odying this position. ‘If someone calls it art, it’s art’, Donald Judd
declared in 1965, rather more straightforwardly, as if bored by the obvi-
ousness of it all. And in ‘Art After Philosophy’, Kosuth quotes this phrase
of Judd’s twice. But who is the ‘I’ or the ‘someone’? And how do they ‘say’
it or ‘call’ it? Kosuth’s answer to this complex institutional question is a
simple one, modelled on the persona of Duchamp: the ‘I’ or the ‘some-
one’ is an artist and an artist is someone (anyone) who ‘questions the
nature of art’. ‘Art’ is the product of the stipulating power of the individ-
ual artist, the individual questioner into the nature of art. The artist as
author, in the sense of formative creator, is replaced by the (meta-)artist
as nominator of artistic status. The death of the author becomes ‘the
birth of the artist as self-curator’.27 This was one of the ways in which
Duchamp’s ready-made was received in the USA in the late 1950s and
early 60s: in terms of an individualistic (indeed, voluntaristic) artistic
nominalism. However, there was a crucial difference between Kosuth’s
situation and that of Duchamp (or even Rauschenberg, whose tongue,
like Duchamp’s, stayed in his cheek). For Kosuth, along with others of his
generation, lacked a pre-established artistic persona, such as Duchamp
had derived from his period of infamy as a painter. Their practice of
self-curation was thus faced with the additional task of constructing an
artistic persona from scratch. Hence the importance of the critical, self-
legitimating philosophical writings of the first generation of Conceptual
artists to the status of their work as ‘art’: as guarantors and guardians of
their right to nomination. The authority of philosophy was used to estab-
lish a right to nomination. Without this critical supplement, their nomi-
nations are unlikely to have been able to sustain their claims to
legitimation.
It is the combination of Conceptualism and Intentionalism in Kosuth’s
conception of art which undermines the distinction between the work
and the artist’s critical discourse. For having established the legitimacy of
the work as art through the analogy with propositional content, it was
only a small step to making a similar claim for the discourse about it,
since it too, paradigmatically, questions the nature of art. Art becomes
the product of the artist’s ‘total signifying activity’.28 Hence Seth
Siegelaub’s reversal of the distinction between ’primary’ and ’secondary’

information which allowed for the exhibition catalogue to take prece-
dence over the exhibits:
. . . when art does not any longer depend upon its physical presence, when it has
become an abstraction, it is not distorted and altered by its representation in
books and catalogues. It becomes primary information, while the reproduction
of conventional art in books or catalogues is necessarily secondary information.
For example, a photograph of a painting is different from a painting, but a pho-
tograph of a photograph is just a photograph, or the setting of a line of type is
just a line of type. When information is primary, the catalogue can become the
exhibition and a catalogue auxiliary to it, whereas in the January, 1969, show
[held at 44 East 52nd St., New York, curated by Siegelaub] the catalogue was pri-
mary and the physical exhibition was auxiliary to it . . . it’s turning the whole
thing around.29
But can the aesthetic dimension of the object be wholly disregarded in the
drive towards ‘propositional’ content? Can the philosophical meaning of
the work actually be wholly abstracted from its material means? Or, to
put it another way, can the constitutive ambiguity characteristic of the
deployment of philosophy within the artistic field ever be finally resolved?
One can be forgiven for doubting it. Especially in the light of the palpably
aesthetic qualities of Kosuth’s own work at the level of typography and
design.
Kosuth’s work attacked the aesthetic definition of the artwork in the
name of linguistic meaning. According to Kosuth, art is a question not of
morphology but of function. This distinction is reflected in his distinction
between a ’stylistic’ Conceptualism which has failed to rid itself of residual
morphological characteristics (in which Kosuth includes Robert Barry,
Douglas Huebler, and Lawrence Weiner – the artists with whom he was
shown in Siegelaub’s January 1969 show) and a ‘purer’ Conceptualism to
which his own work, early Art & Language (Atkinson and Baldwin) and
On Kawara are taken to belong. Yet his own work functioned largely by
placing language within the visual field. How can visual representations of
language be purified of the pre-aestheticized structures of handwriting
and typographical design? Just as by the 1960s the products of Duchamp’s
early acts of aesthetic indifference had acquired a recognizable aesthetic
dimension, so one is forced to conclude with Jeff Wall that:
Kosuth . . . presents the vestiges of the instrumentalised ‘value-free’ academic dis-
ciplines characteristic of the new American-type universities (empiricist sociol-
ogy, information theory, positivist language philosophy) in the fashionable forms
62 peter osborne
of 1960s advertising . . . In this sense conceptualism is the doppelgänger of

Warhol-type ‘Popism’ in its helpless ironic mimicry, not of knowledge, but of the
mechanisms of falsification of knowledge, whose despotic and seductive forms
of display are copied to make art objects.30
In fact, directly contrary to his own self-understanding, we might say that

Kosuth enacts an aestheticization of logical positivism. His categorical
distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘stylistic’ Conceptualism cannot be sus-
tained. The question is not how to eliminate or reduce the aesthetic
dimension of the object (its morphological characteristics) but how, in
each instance, critically to regulate the play between ‘aesthetic’ and ‘con-
ceptual’ terms. As the institutional history of the documentation of per-
formance pieces and temporary works shows, it is an irreducible
dimension of the logic of the artistic field to present visual form, however
attenuated or seemingly irrelevant.
Kosuth used logical positivist philosophy of language as a guillotine to
eradicate the aesthetic dimension of the artwork. Art & Language, on the
other hand, increasingly became caught up in the intellectual seductions
of analytical philosophy as a self-sufficient cultural practice. If Kosuth
conceived art philosophically as propositional in nature, he nonetheless
continued to produce object-instantiated work as the means for the com-
munication of his propositions. Art & Language took a step back, with-
drawing to the immanent investigation of the logical structure of
language itself. In this respect, one might say, they were truer to the idea of
art as investigation than Kosuth himself.
p h i l o s o p h y to t h e s e c o n d d e g r e e : a rt & l a n g uag e
It is a perilous journey returning to the dense prose and contorted intel-
lectualism of the now distant and strange world of the first six issues of
the journal Art-Language (May 1969–Summer 1972). Like documents of
a lost civilization, they demand and resist interpretation, appeal and
repulse, in equal measure. One finds oneself searching for a key, only to be
reminded that in this case the search is the key, and that they were no more
immediately intelligible in their own day than they are today.31
Intellectual difficulty, severity of expression, obsessive formalization,
disjunctiveness and incompleteness are all important aspects of the
writing practice of the Art & Language group, along with a certain
aggressive self-deprecating humour. Subcultural solidarity in the appreci-
ation of difficulty for its own sake has long been central to the appeal of
professional philosophy to outsiders. And this was a group who rapidly
fell in love with the rituals and techniques of rigour characteristic of

logico-linguistic analysis in the Anglo-American manner. The substan-
tive point, however, is that, unlike Kosuth, Art & Language appreciated
the open character of philosophical inquiry as an ongoing task. For
Kosuth, philosophy was essentially a set of positions – positions enabling
of artistic practice, perhaps, but fixed positions nonetheless. With the
keenness of the convert, Kosuth thought he knew what art was: proposi-
tions as to art’s nature. Delving a little deeper, Art & Language wanted to
know what propositions were, and that turned out to be somewhat more
complicated than A. J. Ayer had led Kosuth to expect.
Secondly, Art & Language sought to explore ‘the possibilities of a the-
oretical analysis as a method for (possibly) making art’. (The parenthesis
is typical of their prose.) That is, they were interested in the idea ‘that an
art form can evolve by taking as a point of initial inquiry the language-use
of the art-society’.32 In particular, they were mesmerized by the formal
possibilities of various systems of meaning, in which the radical openness
of purely logical possibility appears to have functioned as a utopian
metaphor for the artistic and the social alike. This, then, was not ‘art as
philosophy’ but philosophy as the possibility of a new kind of art, and
hence a new kind of society; perhaps even philosophy itself as a mode of
Conceptual art. However, by the fourth issue of the journal (November
1971) the expression ‘so-called conceptual art’ had begun to appear,
alongside some fairly scathing philosophical remarks about Kosuth, the
‘American Editor’ of the second and third issues, once Conceptual art had
established itself as a curatorial category.33 Art & Language’s own
claim to the name Conceptual art would largely come later, as part of a
self-serving – indeed, self-promoting – revisionist historiography of the
movement.
The pursuit of philosophy, within its own terms, as the possible basis
of a new kind of art practice simultaneously placed the group closer to
the practitioners of the philosophical field – as co-workers in its enter-
prise – and distanced them from it, in so far as the ‘publication’ of their
activities was conceived as a form of art practice, insulating them from
the legitimating (and delegitimating) mechanisms of the philosophical
field itself. In other words, philosophy was culturally recoded according
to the parameters of the artistic field, however deviant it may have been
within it. In line with the cultural logic of autodidacticism, the group thus
identified with institutional philosophy at the level of its investment in
certain intellectual techniques, but disidentified at the level of its social
form (professionalism). This led to a series of contradictory stances,
64 peter osborne
regarding linguistic elitism, for example, creating a highly strung ambiva-

lence relieved only in alternating bouts of critical aggression and defen-
sive self-parody.34 It is important to remember, though, that the formative
context here was art-educational (with its connections to student poli-
tics), rather than the New York gallery world of Kosuth’s ‘investigations’.
The parody was thus closer to the po-faced absurdism of Situationism
than to the cool irony of the art world.35
These tensions were mediated through the development of the idea of
an Art & Language conversational community (much like the community
of investigators in C. S. Peirce’s pragmatism), but the tensions between
the philosophical, social, and artistic dimensions of the project made this
a utopian quest. The pursuit of technical philosophical advances in
logico-linguistic analysis at the level of the collective action of an artistic
community could only be (and was retrospectively rationalized as) the
metaphorical performance of a necessary failure. Meanwhile, the prob-
lem of the visual dimension of public display, which vitiates Kosuth’s self-
understanding, was to arise again as soon as the Art & Language project
moved out of the spaces of its own community dispatches into the inter-
national art world. Like Kosuth, Art & Language rapidly acquired a
‘look’, which conveyed a quite different social meaning to the one they
intended.36 In this regard, the Documenta Index of 1972 (a massive cross-
referential index system mapping relations of compatibility, incompati-
bility, and lack of relational value between its terms) is not the ‘summary
work of Conceptual Art’ which Charles Harrison has claimed it to be
(characteristically condensing the history of Conceptual art as a move-
ment into the history of Art & Language),37 but it is the summary work of
Art & Language themselves in their development from 1968 to 1972. As
such, it marks both the culmination and the demise of strong
Conceptualism: the fantasy of the resolution of the constitutive ambigu-
ity of philosophy’s double-coding. Henceforth, the irreducible constitu-
tive role of the visual in artistic meaning would be acknowledged as the
basis for a variety of new, frequently more directly political, artistic
strategies, which would continue the battle against the Modernist ideol-
ogy of pure visuality in new, simultaneously ‘visual’ and ‘conceptual’
forms.
t h e va n i s h i n g m e d i ato r
What, then, are we to make of this odd philosophical interlude in the his-
tory of contemporary art which I have called exclusive or strong concep-
tualism? It is tempting to treat it as either an aberration or a sideshow: an
alien intrusion into the art world that has somehow managed to hijack
large amounts of critical and art-historical space, vastly disproportionate
to its significance, to the detriment of other kinds of Conceptual art. But
this would be a mistake. The historical significance of an art practice
bears no necessary relation to the statistical weight of its practitioners or
the temporal span of the practice. It depends more on its catalytic and
constitutive effects upon the meaning of subsequent practices than on its
ability to endure or even to succeed within its own terms. Such is the
experimental nature of modern art. In this respect, analytical, exclusive
or strong Conceptualism displays the character of what Max Weber
called a vanishing mediator: in Jameson’s gloss: ‘a catalytic agent that
permits an exchange of energies between two otherwise mutually exclu-
sive terms . . . [and] serves . . . as a kind of overall bracket or framework
within which change takes place and which can be dismantled and
removed when its usefulness is over.’38 More specifically, one might say,
philosophy was the vanishing mediator in the transition from LeWitt’s
ontologically ambiguous, weak or inclusive Conceptualism to the generic
Conceptuality or post-Conceptual status of art since the mid-1970s. For
in overreacting to the absolutization of the aesthetic in the Modernist ide-
ology of pure visuality – by attempting the complete elimination of the
aesthetic from the artistic field – theoretical or strong Conceptualism ful-
filled the classically Hegelian function of exceeding a limit in such a way
as to render it visible, thereby reinstituting it as a limit on new grounds. It
is the ironic historical function of theoretical or strong Conceptualism,
through its identification with philosophy, to have reasserted the inelim-
inability of the aesthetic as a necessary element of the artwork, via a
failed negation. At the same time, however, it also definitively demon-
strated the radical insufficiency of this element to the meaning-producing
capacity of the work. As such, it reaffirmed the constitutive ambiguity of
philosophy’s double-coding within the artistic field, as an enduring pro-
ductive resource.
Eva Fotiadi
5 From Event to Archive and to Event Again
In 2010, after remaining closed for around six years for renovation and
extension, the building of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam opened its
doors as Temporary Stedelijk. Far from being ready for a grand reopen-
ing, the museum responded to the request of the city of Amsterdam and
opened to operate in a reduced capacity. Temporary Stedelijk had two
phases, the second of which (Temporary Stedelijk 2) presented shows and
activities under the title Making Histories: Changing Views of the Collection.
One of the shows, Recollections ‘remembered’ – to use Reesa Greenberg’s
terminology – three of Stedelijk’s most legendary shows of the 1960s.1
Recollections was divided into two sequential temporal parts,2referred to
here as Recollections I and II. The first part of Recollections ref lected on
the shows Bewogen Beweging [Moved Movement] (1961) and Dylaby (a
contraction of Dynamic Labyrinth) (1962). The second part focused on
Op Losse Schroeven: Situations and Cryptostructures [Square Pegs in Round
Holes] (1969).
These three shows of the 1960s moved away from the concept of the
exhibition as a display of visual, static works of art, and towards introduc-
ing forms of performativity, action and interaction. This chapter presents
each part of Recollections and their curatorial approaches to telling the story
of some of the museum’s most legendary shows. I will consider aspects of
1 For the term ‘remembering’ exhibitions, see Reesa Greenberg, ‘Remembering exhi-
bitions: from point to line to web’, Tate Papers 12 (2009) <http://www.tate.org.uk/
research/tateresearch/tatepapers/09autumn/greenberg.shtm> accessed 18 July 2011,
and Reesa Greenberg, ‘Archival Remembering Exhibitions’, Journal of Curatorial
Studies 1/ 2 (2012), 159–77.
2 Recollections I (March 2011–July 2011). Recollections II (August 2011–October 2011).
86 Eva Fotiadi
the exhibitions’ spatial arrangement, the communication of displays to the

visitors and the use of outcomes of archive research, as all these methods
were used to bring the past into the present. I will also explore how the
term ‘event’, in the various meanings that it can have, is useful in ref lecting
upon the exhibitions of the 1960s and of 2011 with regard to the content,
form and impact of each, as well as in relation to one another.
Bewogen Beweging was curated by the artist Daniel Spoerri in 1961 and
was organized in collaboration with Pontus Hultén, curator at Moderna
Museet, Stockholm. During the spring of 1960, Willem Sandberg, director
of the Stedelijk Museum, invited Spoerri to propose an exhibition about
art with mobile qualities. Spoerri was aware of Hultén’s plans for a similar
show and introduced Sandberg to Hultén. Hultén was young and had only
started as curator at Moderna Museet in 1959. Sandberg, however, had been
director of the Stedelijk since 1945 and was considered to be a legend in
the world of upcoming modern art museums. Dylaby was curated by the
artist Jean Tingueli in 1962.
Tingueli, together with Niki de Saint Phalle, Robert Rauchenberg,
Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri and Per Olof Uitvedt developed the projects
in situ for two weeks prior to the show. Op Losse Schroeven was curated by
Wim Beeren in 1969, the curator at the Stedelijk at the time.3Recollections
I and II were the curatorial debut of Margriet Schavemaker, head of col-
lections and research at the Stedelijk.
Recollecting the three shows of the 1960s posed two major challenges
for the curator in 2011. As noted, these three exhibitions moved away from
the conception of presenting visual, static works of art towards performativ-
ity, action and interaction. Many of the displays were mobile, process and
performance based, interactive, made of perishable materials or document-
ing actions that had taken place. They included environments that activated
3 Op Losse Schroeven was an associate show to Harald Szeemann’s Live in Your Head.
When Attitudes become Form, which opened one week later in Kunsthalle Bern, with
a number of the same artists, several of whom had worked for both shows in situ.
For a parallel study of the shows, see Christian Rattemeyer et al., ed., Exhibiting the
New Art, ‘Op Losse Schroeven’ and ‘When Attitudes Become Form’ 1969 (London:
Afterall etc, 2010).
From Event to Archive and to Event Again 87
the visitors. Consequently, all three exhibitions presented a curatorial

challenge that explored the re-presentation of both the memory of exhibi-
tions and the memory of performative, interactive and ephemeral forms
of art. Dylaby also presented materials that the artists had used, discarded
after the show or kept by individuals as souvenirs, which emphasized the
ephemerality. As Jürgen Harten states, ‘memory is something unwanted,
because it fixes something that can be neither repeated nor reconstructed
in its immediacy. But this immediacy is actually based on a deeper form
of refusal, on a rejection of the archive in principle.’4
Particularly for Dylaby, this lack of archival records increased the
legendary status of the exhibition. This challenge also became one of the
curatorial areas to focus on for Recollections, as it explored the landmark
exhibitions in the history of the Stedelijk Museum: the 1960s work is part
of the Dutch twentieth-century cultural heritage that the museum is also
known for. This critical ref lection, with its dif ficulties, is central to the
discussion of Recollections I.
Recollections I and II were not accompanied by publications. Therefore,
for the curatorial approach, it is useful to provide in some detail the con-
tent of the introductory text panels of each show.5 Both opened with
an identical paragraph about the objectives of the exhibitions, stating the
extraordinary character of the 1960s exhibitions, their popularity over
the years and enquiring whether these exhibitions were still relevant for
contemporary imagination and a contemporary museum.
Moreover, the exhibition panels suggested reasons for the exceptional
character of the 1960s shows. Bewogen Beweging was seen to be innovative:
a ‘collaboration between artists and curators’, but also a ‘survey of interactive
sculpture of the day’. In Dylaby, ‘Jean Tingueli gave artists the freedom to
transform the galleries into a “dynamic labyrinth”’. Accordingly, Op Losse
4 The quote refers to Between, a series of performances and actions, which he curated in
Germany around the same period. Sandra Frimmel, ‘Archives as Clarification Plants
for Contemporary Culture. Unwanted Memories Versus the Urge of Archiving’, inter-
view with Jürgen Harten. Manifesta Journal: Journal of Contemporary Curatorship
2/4–5–6 (2008), 334–41, 336.
5 Accessed during the exhibitions. Website no longer available.
88 Eva Fotiadi
Schroeven is ‘still considered one of the most radical presentations of new art
of the period.’ The curatorial intention reflected on ‘the use of new materials
in art such as light, gas and air’ and drew ‘attention to performances and
conceptual interventions outside the walls of the museum; some of which
were vociferous in critiquing the museum and the art world’.
The panels also provided information about the research context. The
aim of the museum, with Recollections as a starting point, was to produce
new research. For Recollections I, the focus was on such terms as ‘to revisit’,
‘reconsider’, writing ‘new histories’ as contemporary ref lection gives way
to new critical perspectives. In the panel of Recollections II, the ‘re-’ words
and the terms ‘new’ and ‘critical’ were dropped. The text noted the types
of exhibits, namely archival material, documentary material and artworks.
Recollections 1
[‘R]emembering exhibitions’ belong to the practice of spatialising memory, making

memory concrete, tangible, actual and interactive. ‘Remembering exhibitions’ can
be discursive events, dynamic cultural moments of active, widespread exchange and
debate that in turn are catalysts for changing perceptions and practices. They have
the potential for altering past and future views of the exhibition condition.
What we remember is often determined by how we remember.6
Recollections I expanded over eight rooms. In the first three rooms visitors
were presented with posters, archive materials in display cases, installa-
tion shots and photographs of the artists and visitors as well as enlarged
newspaper clippings from 1961 and 1962. Exhibition reviews and photo-
graphs emphasized the mobility, interactivity and playfulness of exhibits,
people’s surprise and often active responses to the exhibits. Photographs
also show that the galleries were packed with works placed quite close to
one another. Dylaby was characterized in the press as the craziest [dollste]
6 Greenberg, ‘Remembering exhibitions’.

exhibition in Stedelijk’s history, but in a rather derogatory way. Around

the time of the 1960s exhibitions, well-known Dutch photographer Ed
van der Elsken made two films, one for each. These were projected in the
fourth room, the only black cube in the exhibition. For Bewogen Beweging,
van der Elsken attempted to use the medium of the film to evoke a sense
of movement in the original exhibition. The film for Dylaby was more of
an advertising trailer, emphasizing its playfulness and the visitors’ interac-
tion, enjoyment and surprise.
The following two rooms contained six works by Tingueli, two works
by Alexander Calder, photographs focusing on Tingueli and memorabilia.
For example, sheets of paper made by one of Tingueli’s machines were
hanging on the wall, neatly framed, like graphic works. For Dylaby, Niki
de Saint Phalle had created a shooting room where visitors could shoot
colour against dif ferent objects. The respective memorabilia in Recollections
I included a rif le in a display case, above which the face of a mannequin
Figure 5.1: Recollections I: Bewogen Beweging (1961) and Dylaby (1962), Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam, 2011. Photograph and courtesy: Stedelijk Museum.
90 Eva Fotiadi
stained with colours was hanging. The spatial arrangement of the exhibits
was somewhat striking in these rooms: there was plenty of space between
exhibits, and exhibits were placed on plinths, behind glass or rope. A guard
was always present to ensure visitors kept a distance from Tingueli’s interac-
tive, yet fragile machines. Everything was static, each exhibit surrounded
by ample space and unapproachable by the public. This was a complete
contradiction to the photographs from the 1960s that revealed densely
filled spaces of exhibits animated by surprised and interactive responses
to the work. While the memorabilia had been originally rescued from the
garbage, they were now treated as valuable, aesthetic objects.7The last room
was a research area with tables, chairs, computers, books and photocopied
archive documents to browse through.
The installation of displays (archive documents, artworks and memo-
rabilia) of Recollections I was unadventurous in relocating history to the
present. There was no serious attempt – at least to my understanding – of
finding a new exhibition language pertinent to an exhibition of archives
and histories, or of finding a curatorial approach that would open up rather
than instruct its interpretations, nor was there an attempt to translate or
reactivate the dynamic and interactive character of the 1960s shows in the
installation of the 2011 exhibition.
The research for new histories and critical perspectives focused utterly
on the strengths of the 1960s exhibitions. These aspects coincided with
how these exhibitions are remembered and celebrated in art history: char-
acteristic of Willem Sandberg’s radical museum projects where he col-
laborated with artists, sometimes allowing them a great deal of freedom,
or brought pioneering art into the museum, which the public and press
sometimes rejected. The display cases contained letters from the Bewogen
Beweging archives that unpicked the perspectives of the individual roles by
Sandberg, Hultén and Spoerri, although this was not commented upon in
7 Ute Meta Bauer. ‘Do-it-Yourself: Exhibitions by artists during the 20th century’
<http://www.worldofart.org/english/98/98ute2.htm> accessed 17 April 2013.
the interpretation as such. For example, in a letter to Sandberg,8Spoerri’s

approach as a mediator between Hultén and Sandberg appears somewhat
opportunistic. He is dismissive of Hultén’s approach of combining art-
works with non-art displays, tries to consolidate his role as curator of the
Amsterdam exhibition and argues for opening the tour of the exhibition
in Amsterdam. However, a few days later, in a letter to Sandberg,9Hultén
argues that it would be important to open the tour in Stockholm. He
explains that he had been working on this show since 1954 (while Sandberg
invited Spoerri in 1960) as the largest show to be realized during his six-year
term as director. Indeed, in a letter dated 20 January 1961, it is evident that
the project was greater for Hultén than what was conceived by Sandberg
and Spoerri. Sandberg writes to Hultén stating that he is not familiar with
most of the works on the insurance list he received.10
The same primacy of Hultén’s role in preparing the show is confirmed
when one compares the archival material of the show at the Moderna
Museet11 with the material in the Stedelijk Museum. Moderna Museet holds
a vast archive of correspondence by artists and galleries and material about
the loans of artworks: the archive is much larger than that of the Stedelijk
Museum – even if one considers that Spoerri carried out most curatorial
arrangements, and his archive is not stored at the Stedelijk. In the end, for
practical reasons connected to other scheduled shows at the Stedelijk, the
exhibition tour opened in Amsterdam. In the history of art exhibitions,
Bewogen Beweging now comes across much more as a Stedelijk museum
project, perhaps more so than is suggested by its own archive documents.
Another aspect of the Stedelijk’s history that Recollections could have
addressed in relation to Dylaby is the juxtaposition of an unrealized exhibi-
tion by the Situationists International, discussed with Willem Sandberg
8 Spoerri to Sandberg, letter dated 4 October 1960, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

exhibition archives: Bewogen Beweging 1961, folder 3980.
9 Hultén to Sandberg, letter dated 14 October 1960, ibid.
10 Sandberg to Hultén, letter dated 20 January 1961, ibid.
11 Moderna Museet Stockholm archives. Archive Rörelse i Konsten, 17 May–3 September
1961.
92 Eva Fotiadi
in 1959–60.12 The Situationists had proposed turning two of the museum

galleries into a labyrinth, a mix of indoor and outdoor spaces, complete
with artificial rain, fog and wind. They even proposed to create a hole in
the building’s external wall to serve as the entrance.13Their objective was
to turn the museum galleries into an environment that would mobilize
visitors’ interaction and address a variety of senses. However, the plan was
cancelled when the Situationists refused to deal with the safety regula-
tions and fundraising, requested by Sandberg. The Situationists plan is
strikingly comparable to Dylaby in the idea of transforming the museum
galleries into a labyrinth as a total installation, and the two projects are so
close chronologically that it is peculiar that Recollections’ critical revisit
of the past missed out on addressing the connection between the exhibi-
tions. In the end, in terms of historical research, there was no substantial
attempt to locate – let alone critically locate – the 1960s exhibitions in a
broader historical, curatorial, social, political or other context. The agenda
to revisit, reconsider and give way to critical perspectives was not fulfilled.
Recollections II
The Archive for a Work-Event participates in such debates by putting forth the idea
that it is impossible to reproduce experiences a posteriori. It means that in the face of
the artistic practices that depend on them, we researchers have the unavoidable task
of finding ways of communicating them. This is all the more so the case if we want
to bring closer the thinking poetics that traverse those works, and to keep alive both
their power to af fect the present and to be af fected by it by means of new experiences.
12 Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam exhibition archives: Situationists International 1960

(Unrealized), folder 5512.
13 ‘Die Welt als Labyrinth’, translated into English by Paul Hammond, Situationist
International <http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/diewelt.htm> accessed 28 July
2011. First published in Internationale Situationiste 4 ( January 1960) 5–7.
To answer that demand, we must go beyond the simple gathering of documentation

from the time, its organization, and its being made available to the public.14
In the second part of Recollections the idea of criticality was dropped from
the exhibition’s agenda in the introductory wall text. However, Recollections
II did have a specific agenda and approach beyond what is generally remem-
bered about Op Losse Schroeven. It took Wim Beeren’s initial curatorial
interest in new materials in art of the 1960s, and examined how Op Losse
Schroeven had an impact on the museum’s (later) collection acquisitions.
Archive documents, installation photographs, wall texts and artworks were
materials also used in Recollections II. But this time the show combined
narrative reconstructions of the past based on the museum’s archives with
readings of the exhibition’s past in the collection’s present, in ways that
the combination of information and artworks on display provoked new
thinking poetics in addition to recalling old ones.
The presence of artworks was much stronger in Recollections II. The
exhibition started with Mario Merz’s work Unreal City (1968) that was also
exhibited in 1969. The following couple of rooms contained a 1969 poster
and archive documents in display cases. Among the documents displayed
were notes by Beeren about new materials used in art such as air, electricity
and soil. Photographic documentation was displayed in a room with two
slide projectors, unlike the enlarged prints on walls used for Recollections
I. The dark room of the slide projections altered the viewing experience,
which was similar to the alteration performed by the room containing
Ed van der Elsken’s films in Recollections I: from moving between static
exhibits to sitting or standing still in front of images unfolding in time.
The photographs included installation shots, artists at work, performances
and temporary interventions inside and outside of the building. The old
photographs demonstrated how radically the artists engaged with the space.
For example, Ger van Elk hung a canvas curtain over the central museum
14 Suerli Rolnik, ‘Active for a Work-Event, Activating the Body’s Memory of Lygia
Clark’s Poetics and its Context, Part II’, Manifesta Journal, 14/82, 72–80 <http://
www.manifestajournal.org/issues/souvenirs-souvenirs/archive-work-event-activating-
bodys-memory-lygia-clarks-poetics-and-its> accessed 4 March 2013.
94 Eva Fotiadi
staircase dividing it into two (Apparatus Scalas Dividens, 1968), while Jan
Dibbets dug trenches about one metre deep at each corner of the building,
exposing its foundations (Museum Pedestal with four Angles of 90°, 1969).15
The remaining rooms contained artworks. Most of the works included
in Recollections II were not the same as those in Op Losse Schroeven. Instead
they were works by the same artists bought later by the Stedelijk, a selection
that directly ref lected the agenda of investigating the impact of the tem-
porary exhibition on the permanent collection. In the wall texts, the cura-
tor connected this body of work to the artists’ contributions for Op Losse
Schroeven and Wim Beeren’s interest in materials. For instance, Jan Dibbets’s
work, which had recently been exhibited in another show of Temporary
Stedelijk I, was not included. Instead, two films were included, Horizon I
& II from 1970 and 1971, which show images of an ocean. According to the
wall text, the two films were connected to a project proposal that Dibbets
had published in the 1969 exhibition catalogue, based on an idea for a
film about the North Sea. Another example is Dennis Oppenheim’s work
Gallery Transplant. Floor Specifications Gallery No. 2, Stedelijk Museum
Amsterdam, Netherlands (1969), a piece representing the f loor plan of the
museum that Oppenheim intended to transplant in New Jersey country-
side.16 However, when the photo documentation from New Jersey failed
to arrive, Oppenheim carried out an alternative project in farmland close to
the city of Groningen, in the north of the Netherlands. In a few cases, such
as Bruce Nauman, three films and a neon work displayed in Recollections
II were the same as in Op Losse Schroeven, and arranged in a similar spatial
configuration, as the wall text explained.
In terms of spatial arrangement and of the use of gallery space,
Recollections II was also not exceptionally adventurous. In comparison to
the process-oriented projects or the performative gestures of many artists’
contributions in 1969, the 2011 shows felt static and fixed. However, this
character was in tune with the curatorial agenda of exploring the impact on
15 Titles, descriptions and other details of Op Losse Schroeven are taken here from
Rattemeyer, Exhibiting the New Art; for Recollections II, texts in the exhibition.
16 Specifically the f loor plans of galleries 1, 6, 9 and 12 were transplanted to New Jersey.
artworks bought later for the collection – artworks that were maintainable,
not completely ephemeral. The 2011 installation also revealed the chang-
ing limitations and possibilities in the use of museum galleries then and
now, such as health and safety regulations and a smartphone audioguide
to the 1969 show.
In terms of research, Recollections II appeared more renewing, produc-
tive and daring than Recollections I. The research outcomes were presented
by means of selecting artworks from the collection, and comparing them
with the intentions and selection of Wim Beeren and his invited artists.
As a consequence, the show of fered two interwoven stories. One focus-
ing on the past, a story about Op Losse Schroeven based on research in the
archives and collection, and a second that brought to the surface informa-
tion about the museum’s history of acquisitions. More importantly, the
ongoing juxtaposition of past and present unfolding through information
that contextualized the artworks between the 1969 exhibition and the later
acquisitions demonstrated a curatorial process that aimed to encourage
and activate the viewer to focus on these conceptual frameworks. This
was made possible because the texts accompanying works did not provide
information as historical facts. Rather, they communicated the relations
between the 1969 show and the works from the collection: the interpreta-
tion and curatorial objectives of Recollections II. As a consequence, the most
interesting aspect of this layered information between the displays of 1969
and 2011 could be found in the wall texts and smartphone audio guide.
The exhibition as event
In the last part of this chapter I will consider the old exhibitions as events, a
story of which was told (re)using a similar event format in another exhibi-
tion. I will use the term ‘event’ in its various meanings. Recollections I and II
were not to be experienced as art exhibitions, but as exhibitions about art
exhibitions. Still, as presentation and communication platforms or media in
an art museum, the 1960s and the 2011 exhibitions are comparable as events.
96 Eva Fotiadi
Regarding the presentation of artworks and communication with

viewers, a concept of ‘event’ can be traced back to Kant’s analysis of aes-
thetic judgment. The impact of an artwork on a viewer, the experience of
beauty or the sublime in the moment, comprises an event of the free play
of the imagination. During the twentieth century, one can find related
concepts of the event, for instance, in the philosophy of Georg Gadamer.
For Gadamer, when a viewer encounters an artwork, a hermeneutic circle
takes place between the viewer and the artwork. In his theory, this her-
meneutic circle comprised the event of the interpretation of the artwork,
outside of which the artwork does not exist to the world. In other words,
the aesthetic experience and interpretation of an artwork has the form of
a play back-and-forth between viewer and artwork, and that comprises the
mode of being of the work and its hermeneutic significance.17
But things have changed significantly with the advent and expansion
of forms of art, such as happenings, performances and process-based art.
Here, the work of art was not the thing encountered by a viewer in its final
form: not ‘just’ becoming an event in every viewer’s experience. Rather,
the becoming is inherent in the very form of the work itself – the work is
an event. The event is not only occurring in the viewer’s experience of the
work: in participatory works, the viewer plays a part in the event – it is
part of the process essential to the formation of the work. Therefore, the
event in the form of taking place, of the aesthetic experience of Kant, or
of the hermeneutic circle of Gadamer, has been transferred to the process
that develops and determines the work. The term ‘event’ is used similarly
to the open form of some performative and interactive works.
Now, a second meaning (or content) of the term ‘event’ can be added.
The concept of such forms of art as performances and happenings caused
a significant change in the history of Western art. Therefore, the second
meaning of the term ‘event’ is of something that breaks new ground, a
17 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd revised edition (London, New York:
Continuum, 2004. For more on play in aesthetics from Kant to Gadamer, and the
role there of a concept of ‘event’, see Eva Fotiadi, The Game of Participation in Art
and the Public Sphere (Maastricht: Schaker 2011) 64–78, 171–89.
rupture within an existing norm, similar also to historical events or politi-

cal events.
Let me return to the exhibitions Bewogen Beweging, Dylaby and Op
Losse Schroeven, and to a third meaning of the term ‘event’. Temporary art
exhibitions in general, regardless of what kind of art they may contain,
can be called social events. They are staged situations within which cul-
tural products are presented in public for a limited period of time. A third
meaning of the ‘event’ is added: namely, the event of the exhibition as a
temporary staged presentation and communication situation. This situa-
tion contains the first meaning: the event in the form of the spectator’s
experience of the work, and possibly also the event as in the form of the
work, and potentially also the second meaning – the event as rupture or
break. In fact, all three historical exhibitions, Bewogen Beweging, Dylaby
and Op Losse Schroeven, were among the first shows of artworks that had
the character of events, namely happenings, performances and process-
based artworks. Furthermore, the project of Dylaby, as a dynamic labyrinth
made up of site-specific and interactive projects, redefined the categories
of the art exhibition and the artwork. Dylaby was an ongoing, performa-
tive happening. Its various objects, materials and settings had mainly the
function of props rather than of art objects, which is why most of them
were discarded afterwards or kept as memorabilia.
Something similar may be claimed for Op Losse Schroeven. Namely,
the curator invited the artists to perform creative work in situ. Some of the
works were in ongoing processes of becoming or transformation during
the show, like Marinus Boezem’s project Weather Report (1969), which was
updated daily according to the weather forecast, or Giovanni Anselmo’s
sculpture Untitled (Structure Eating Salad, 1968), comprising a lettuce sup-
porting a small block of granite – as the lettuce expired, its support loos-
ened. Some other works, like the aforementioned canvas curtain hanging
over the staircase by Ger van Elk, intervened into the space of the visitors’
activities, also outside the exhibition galleries.
To pull the threads together, all three shows of the 1960s were ground-
breaking events in the histories of art, museums and curating. Firstly, for
the new art that they presented. Secondly, for how they comprised recon-
ceptualization and reconfiguration of the medium of the exhibition as a
98 Eva Fotiadi
situation/platform for presenting artworks. Thirdly, and partially due to

the previous two reasons, Dylaby was a particularly hybrid project – both
for its art and the exhibition.
As I argue in the first part, Recollections I comprised a rather static
display. If there is a meaning of the term ‘event’ in the gallery that would
be relevant to Recollections I, it would be the first meaning – the event of
the viewer’s experience and/or interpretation when encountering an (art)
object. Recollections I remained a rather event-less event, as demonstrated
by the results of its objectives, the desire to provide fresh research about
the exhibition histories. It remained rather event-less: its installation and
research outcomes did not try to activate or interpret displays, visitors,
archives or history from a contemporary perspective. As an exhibition it
did not translate or transform the exhibited old event into the present.
Recollections I was an event of nostalgia, reliving the days of the 1960s
through newspaper articles, group photographs of the artists, letters, van
der Elsken’s films and photographs of the exhibitions and visitors. It was
a commemorative event.
In both its agenda and implementation, Recollections II faced the cura-
torial challenge of ‘remembering’ a previous exhibition. The focus on the
impact of Op Losse Schroeven on the collection of the Stedelijk Museum,
with Wim Beeren’s initial interest in new materials as a reference point,
made Recollections II an exhibition that was simultaneously about the past
(1969, Op Losse Schroeven) and the present (2011, Stedelijk’s collection and
galleries). Here, the physical attention on the new acquisitions, combined
with a transformation of the historical event into something of the present,
beyond a renewed nostalgia, meant that the ‘event’ was present primarily
in the information layer of the exhibition, for example in wall panels and
individual object labels. The works operated somewhat like props or illus-
trations of the history of Op Losse Schroeven and its impact on the museum
collection, as these histories were presented in the wall texts and captions
of Recollections II. Still, it seems to me that the transfer of the recollected
event to the layer of information, and providing visitors comparisons with
the present, resulted in a meaningful enough format for an exhibition that
re-collected memories. It was meaningful because the information layer had
the dynamics of new research, open to a deeper investigation, additions,
doubts, questions and debates. The information was relevant to special-

ists and the general public. Consequently, Recollections II, even if not a
ground-breaking exhibition event, did display the potential of transferring
the three meanings of the ‘event’ from art exhibitions to exhibitions of the
living history of art exhibitions.
Bibliography
Frimmel, Sandra, ‘Archives as Clarification Plants for Contemporary Culture.

Unwanted Memories Versus the Urge of Archiving’, interview with Jürgen
Harten. Manifesta Journal: Journal of Contemporary Curatorship 2/ 4–5–6
(2008), 334–41, 336.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method (London, New York: Continuum, 2004).
Greenberg, Reesa ‘Remembering exhibitions: from point to line to web’, Tate Papers 12
(2009) <http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/09autumn/
greenberg.shtm> accessed 18 July 2011.
Greenberg, Reesa, ‘Archival Remembering Exhibitions’, Journal of Curatorial Studies
1/2 (2012), 159–77.
Rattemeyer, Christian, et al., eds, Exhibiting the New Art. ‘Op Losse Schroeven’ and
‘When Attitudes Become Form’ 1969 (London: Afterall etc., 2010).
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Clark’s Poetics and its Context, Part II. Manifesta Journal, 14, 72–80. Die Welt
als Labyrinth <http://www.manifestajournal.org/sites/default/files/issues-pdf/
mj14-souvenirs-souvenirs/MJ-14_1.pdf> accessed 4 March 2013.
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line/si/diewelt.htm> accessed 28 July 2011. First published in Internationale
Situationiste 4 ( January 1960).
Archives
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Rörelse i Konsten, 17 May – 3 September 1961 (Stockholm: archive at Museet Stockholm).
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Barry Flanagan. (2021, 22 juin). Op losse Schroeven, Amsterdam 1969 | Group Exhibition. https://
www.barryflanagan.com/exhibitions/op-losse-schroeven/
Bereen, W., Harrison, C., Szeemann, H., Trini, T., Rattemeyer, C. & Gleadowe, T. (2011).
Exhibiting the New Art : « Op Losse Schroeven » and « When Attitudes Become Form 1969
» (Exhibition Histories). Afterall Books.
Bottinelli, S. (2015). The Discourse of Modern Nomadism : The Tent in Italian Art and Architecture
of the 1960s and 1970s. Art Journal, 74(2), 62-80. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2015.1095540
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Millet, C. (2013a). L’art contemporain (French Edition). Flammarion.
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Op Losse Schroeven: Situaties en Cryptostructuren

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Op Losse Schroeven : situaties en cryptostructuren

15 Mars - 27 Avril 1969

Curateur : Wim Beeren

Op Losse Schroeven, exposition marquante de 1969, introduit publiquement l’art conceptuel

Op Losse Schroeven reste et restera insaisissable.

1 Millet, Catherine, (2013), L’art contemporain (French Edition), Flammarion, p. 40.

Beeren an~ o:1fc:ober 1967) 25document

The ride. Untitled? But we thought· let' l . ect1ons

·n 1hc iEN : For th xh' .

Wim Beeren (1928-2000) curaced 'Op Losse Schroeven' ac the Scedelijk

6.2 Piero Gilardi’s exhibitions and

Gilardi published the diary of his experiences in London and D sseldorf

Beeren, then curator of the Stedelijk useum in Amsterdam, and Harald

1.2 The historical contextualisation of conceptual art with references to the

1.3 Conceptual art

1.3.2. Conceptual art in the Netherlands: Beeren, Gilardi and Cornwell

1.4 Reception: irony

1.4.1. Ger van Elk: ironic self-reflection

By 1960, an alreadyquite developed programof participatoryand interac-

an "idea" or intellectualexercise,but thatthe "work"itselfis reducedto a plan and its realization,even in

This content downloaded from 66.194.72.152 on Sat, 31 Aug 2013 14:01:49 PM

rearrangedand manipulatedanalogouslyto linguisticunits like wordsor letters;

Weinerinsists,in a 1971 interview,that "the workitselfis information."He

29. Weiner in Lynn Gumpert,"Interviewwith Lawrence Weiner,"in EarlyWork(New York: New

This content downloaded from 66.194.72.152 on Sat, 31 Aug 2013 14:01:49 PM

acceptthingsonlyon a verbalinformation level (typeon thepage).... Iftheinforma-

This content downloaded from 66.194.72.152 on Sat, 31 Aug 2013 14:01:49 PM

Legend has it thatWeinerarticulatedthismodel aftera 1968 exhibitionat

This content downloaded from 66.194.72.152 on Sat, 31 Aug 2013 14:01:49 PM

This content downloaded from 66.194.72.152 on Sat, 31 Aug 2013 14:01:49 PM

43. RichardSerra,"AboutDrawing"(1977), RichardSerra:Interviews, Etc. 1970-1980 (Yonkers,N.Y:

This content downloaded from 66.194.72.152 on Sat, 31 Aug 2013 14:01:49 PM

CAA_SU15_KH.indd 71 9/11/15 5:48 PM

CAA_SU15_KH.indd 72 9/11/15 5:48 PM

CAA_SU15_KH.indd 73 9/11/15 5:48 PM

© Association of Art Historians 2013 435

13 Ugo Nespolo, Molotov,

© Association of Art Historians 2013 436

It is difficult to bungle a good idea.

particular place, in Bourdieu’s sociological sense of the term?1 Certainly,

philosophy allows for the recoding of ‘art’ as ‘philosophy’ while leaving

form and effects of these investments will lead us towards a provisional

notion of truth to materials, this was problematic. For LeWitt, on the

What this reveals is that LeWitt is not really thinking ontologically

Adrian Piper, Catalysis III (street performance), August 1970.

for a purely conceptual art. In it we find a transition from the negative

aesthetic. The positivism of Kosuth’s understanding of Conceptual art is

exaggeration of the cultural authority of the artist’s critical discourse,

Siegelaub’s reversal of the distinction between ’primary’ and ’secondary’

of 1960s advertising . . . In this sense conceptualism is the doppelgänger of

In fact, directly contrary to his own self-understanding, we might say that

fell in love with the rituals and techniques of rigour characteristic of

regarding linguistic elitism, for example, creating a highly strung ambiva-

5 From Event to Archive and to Event Again

the exhibitions’ spatial arrangement, the communication of displays to the

the visitors. Consequently, all three exhibitions presented a curatorial

[‘R]emembering exhibitions’ belong to the practice of spatialising memory, making

6 Greenberg, ‘Remembering exhibitions’.

exhibition in Stedelijk’s history, but in a rather derogatory way. Around

the interpretation as such. For example, in a letter to Sandberg,8Spoerri’s

8 Spoerri to Sandberg, letter dated 4 October 1960, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

in 1959–60.12 The Situationists had proposed turning two of the museum

12 Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam exhibition archives: Situationists International 1960