Fictions of the Studio

Author(s): Michael Belshaw

Source: The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Fall 2011), pp. 38-49
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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 Fictions of the Studio

MICHAEL BELSHAW

Not so long ago the occasional story would be told in the news that
someone with a fascination for all things medical had spent months or
even years masquerading as a doctor in a large and anonymous hospital.
No doubt the absence of such stories today is due to heightened security
and vigilance, partly as a result of the realization among hospital staff that
such individuals were indeed at large. No doubt too the number of such
cases was due to the opportunity afforded by the freedom of movement of
professional staff and the size of the institution in question. For that reason,
it is hard to imagine such opportunities existing elsewhere, then or now.
Nonetheless, it may be heuristic to think of this situation occurring in a fine
art teaching studio. That is to say, it may prove insightful to think of the dif-
ference between the professional artist-teacher and the fake, not only from
the viewpoint of the student but also, more widely, in terms of the efficacy
of their respective advice. Can we be confident, in other words, that in the
absence of a taught skill, the advice of the professional teacher will produce
a better result than that of someone aping his or her pedagogical practice?
Moreover, is there something especially telling in the skill required to ape
the teacher who has perhaps developed considerable interpersonal skills in
the course of conversations with students but has no subject-specific skills
to impart? And does it not reveal more clearly the situation of the teach-
ing studio by suggesting that the professional art teacher is always already
the masquerader—the one who speaks the language of the institution while
performing the role of autonomous artist? To explore these questions we
might reflect on Marcel Broodthaers’s observation: “Fiction enables us to
grasp reality and at the same time that which is veiled by reality.”1 This sug-
gests that to regard a situation as a fiction is to see it as a kind of surface—a
veil or screen on which the real appears—and, as we see this image of ­reality,

Michael Belshaw (PhD) teaches at Loughborough University and Leeds College of

Art and Design. He completed his PhD with a dissertation on “Art, Writing, and Au-
tobiography” in 2006 and has written conference papers on the artist’s studio and
theories of self-reference for a number of years. He is currently working on a studio
painting by Jasper Johns and a theory of artists’ statements.

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 45, No. 3, Fall 2011

©2011 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
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 Fictions of the Studio   39

we also see that what is veiled is the screen itself. Broodthaers’s work is a
form of institutional critique concerned with the reception of art in the mu-
seum, and the reality he sought to unveil was the ideology of consumption
and display. Closer to our present interests is a work by the Jackson Pollock
Bar—one that enacts the making of a painting according to a script. While
it is not intended to stage the look or manner of art practice in a teaching
studio, this “theory installation”—Art & Language Paints a Picture installed
in the Style of the Jackson Pollock Bar (1999)—may usefully be compared to
such a scene not least because the resulting canvas bears an interesting and
problematic relation to the moment of its production. Such means and ends
are the two ends we will try to bring together in the course of this paper.
The work in question comprises a script, a performance, and the
­subsequently exhibited painting. The script, written by Art & Language in
1983 to accompany the exhibition of their studio paintings, takes the form
of a dialogue for a conversation in a studio and includes stage directions for
making the picture on the floor. This became the source for the performance
by the Jackson Pollock Bar, who followed the directions and mimed the dia-
logue to a recording of the script that had been translated into Catalan.2
The dialogue is a kind of Beckettian studio conversation in which the artists
reflect on the lamentable conditions of producing art under the “emotiv-
ist instrumentalities of the manager’s culture.”3 Part of the original script
reads, “We adopt various personae. We are artists acting ‘artist.’ The works,
paintings we produce are like masks which are invitations to look behind
them, where meaning and signification is perpetually fugitive. If you talk of
fugitive significance . . .”4
Following a script in the form of an explicit rule had been a familiar
­procedure of Conceptual Art since Sol LeWitt’s writing gave currency to
the term. Eliminating the material outcome of such a rule in favor of the
rule itself centralized the role of language in art. Subsequently, having fore-
grounded the generic at the cost of the specific, as Joseph Kosuth saw it,
the institution—generally understood in terms of the museum or gallery,
though also more widely in terms of the “art world”—has been an abid-
ing issue in theory and practice. In light of this it may be said that acting
aptly describes the behavior of participants in the art institution and thus
characterizes the relationship between what is shown in a museum and the
discourse that put it there as a kind of script. To fill this out it is useful to
draw on David Bloor’s Wittgensteinian account of rules and institutions.
An institution, Bloor argues, “is a collective pattern of self referring activ-
ity,” one in which “the rule itself is part of the currency of interaction, and a
medium of self-understanding.”5 For example, “marriage” is an institution
in that it functions by agreement among participants. There are no physical
properties of spouses that identify their roles as husband and wife. What is
called “marriage” therefore has to be agreed upon among those who partici-
pate in the institution. It might then be asked—just what is it that they agree

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 40   Belshaw

on? Pointing to the exchange of rings in a wedding ceremony as evidence

of marriage would only beg the question of what it is to agree that this is a
wedding ceremony. Pushed far enough it will become clear that the content
of such questions lies squarely within the language in which they are for-
mulated. That is to say, such questions are circular since they refer only to
the agreement among participants in the same language game.

All of these things are said to others and to oneself and are
heard being said by others. In standard sociological parlance, the
rule is an “actor’s category.” It is not just a spectator’s description of
a group’s behavior, or an idea utilized by an outside theorist wish-
ing to summarize and predict their behavior. It is used by the actors
themselves in such a way that the phenomenon of following a rule
is not distinct from the descriptions given of it. Rather, it is a body of
behavior that includes the behavior of ascribing or withholding that
very description itself.6

Where Bloor explains the logic of institutions according to his reading

of Wittgenstein, the Jackson Pollock Bar make the language of the institu-
tion opaque by submitting it to a second-order representation. Given that
the university inculcates such rules in the teaching of art, could we not also
say that the “picture painted by actors” characterizes the procedures of that
overlooked site of institutional critique, the teaching studio; and, more-
over, that it problematizes not only the efficacy of the teacher’s advisory
role but also the evaluation of student work? It is interesting in this regard
that Charles Harrison, writing as a member of Art & Language, struggles to
evaluate the picture resulting from the scripted performance.

I had no expectation of dwelling for long on [the painting’s] appear-

ance, or of making any serious claims for such aesthetic properties as
it might be thought to display. I assumed that the interesting issues
would be those that surrounded the production of the painting, not
those that might attach to its merits as a finished work. But I was giv-
en pause by the outcome of the performance. Hence the dilemma. It is
not because the painting turned out better than I had envisaged—by
which I mean that it surprised me with some strange virtue in itself. It
is rather, I suppose, that I was made aware of how much less substan-
tial a relic of performance might be and still be treated as deserving of
serious if not reverential attention when displayed in an art gallery.7

Like the late canvases of Willem de Kooning, painted when he was suffering
from Alzheimer’s, it is as though the conditions under which the painting
was made stymied any judgment of taste or value. In this sense we might
think of Harrison’s difficulty as akin to that of the art teacher faced with
student work all the while reflecting on the institutional script according to
which it was made and according to which it was rendered the remnant of
a fiction. Considered as “inseparable from the theory installation by which
it was generated,” the painting by the Jackson Pollock Bar had to be seen

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 Fictions of the Studio   41

as a “stage prop with a life of it’s own,” though not something that is “an
artwork in its own right.”8 This provisional status serves to remind us that
­student work is always played out in the scene of teaching in which a form of
script—the rules, conventions, and procedures of a department of fine art—
is variously consulted and adhered to and that such a script is no more open
to question by the student-artist than a dramatic dialogue is open to debate
by one of its characters. That is to say, to attempt such a question would be to
step outside of the role the institution has created for the individual.
While institutional critique, in its most familiar form, addresses sites
of display, student-work is evidently indexed to the site of production. In
both cases the methodological conundrum to be faced is whether the work
produced is critical of, or complicit with, the host institution. This question
virtually defines the difficulty and the interest in institutional critique since
it is in the nature of institutions in our culture to act in a corporate manner
by absorbing all ideological opposition. Moreover, if we understand ideol-
ogy to mean a “confusion of linguistic with natural reality,” as Paul de Man
puts it, it may be that the teaching studio, with its professional commitment
to the aesthetic, is especially prone to such confusion.9 Under such circum-
stances and according to such an analysis, how should we address these
“emotivist instrumentalities of the manager’s culture”?10
In his much discussed book The University in Ruins, Bill Readings argues
that the university has in recent years abandoned its fidelity to the culture
of a nation in favor of the notion of “excellence.” The contrasting case for
Readings is the “university of culture.” From its inception at the beginning
of the nineteenth century to its decline in the late 1960s, the university of cul-
ture defined itself by reference to an external standard—the achievements
of a nation. In serving the citizenship of the nation, the university would
produce the culture that gave it its raison d’etre. In the absence of such stan-
dards in today’s university, Readings says, “What gets taught or researched
matters less than the fact that it be excellently taught or researched.”11 Thus
the idea of excellence, while promising a standard of achievement, has no
necessary or specific content that can give that standard a sense of purpose.
Excellence, in this way, is rather like “expensive.” Its equivalent, Readings
says, is found in the cash-nexus, and this gives rise to the idea that the uni-
versity is a kind of transnational corporation.

“Excellence” is like the cash-nexus in that it has no content; it is hence

neither true nor false, neither ignorant nor self-conscious. It may be
unjust, but we cannot seek its injustice in terms of a regime of truth or
of self-knowledge. Its rule does not carry with it an automatic politi-
cal or cultural orientation, for it is not determined in relation to any
identifiable instance of political power.12

One of the corollaries of this absence of content is that excellence

­provides a “unit of value in terms of which the University describes ­itself

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 42   Belshaw

to itself, in terms of which the University achieves the self-consciousness

that is ­supposed to guarantee intellectual autonomy in modernity.”13 While
excellence as such is not self-conscious, it nevertheless produces a kind of
self-consciousness with regard to its host institution. Readings doesn’t pur-
sue the idea of the self-consciousness of the university, but it is germane to
my argument. As the measure applied within a “closed system” or “internal
market,” excellence, we might say, is both objective and subjective—it must
seem to be an impartial standard of evaluation and yet it is whatever the
university determines it should be. In this sense, the university achieves a
kind of institutional self-consciousness. In contrast to the university of cul-
ture, the university of excellence appears to speak with its own authoritative
voice even if it cannot, at the same time, claim to do so without seeming to
make arbitrary judgements. This voice, I would suggest, can be heard in the
narrative of the teaching studio.
Readings’s analysis of the university of excellence, which he also calls
the “posthistorical university,” bears comparison with Howard Singerman’s
discussion of the teaching of postmodern art as he describes it in his book
Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University. Singerman explains
that, by the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism had become both the national
style and the university style in America. This teaching of a modern Ameri-
can style of art, seen against the background of Cold War ideology, clearly
fits the model of the university of culture. The turning point and departure
from that model comes with the emergence of postmodern practices and the
emphatic role of language in art teaching in the 1960s.
Even, perhaps especially, at their most critical, the artists and theorists of
postmodernism repeat the demands of the university: a “demythologizing
criticism and a truly postmodernist art [that would] void the basic proposi-
tions of modernism [and] liquidate them by exposing their fictitious condi-
tion” requires the production of ever clearer and more knowing works of
art and the development of ever more effective methodologies to place and
determine them.14
Singerman’s argument draws on Rosalind Krauss’s writing on the
­index—a concept that Singerman agrees defines the art of the time, but
one, he says, that also characterizes the contradictions of teaching art in the
university. Whether as a photograph, a footprint, a shadow, or personal or
demonstrative pronouns, the indexical sign is in constant need of meaning
since it is only capable of indication, of reference without sense. In this way,
the work in question remains mute relative to its supplemented meaning
in language. In other words, the indexical sign is not in itself language-like.
Moreover, as Krauss has argued, the paradigm instance of the indexical in
art is the readymade, an object that, from the moment of its being called a
work of art, continually elicits the same designation from the spectator. And,
for Singerman, just as the index is an “empty” or “hollow” sign, ­requiring,
as it does, the supplementing meaning of language, so that staple of the

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 Fictions of the Studio   43

­ niversity teaching studio—the visiting artist—supplements his or her

u
work by traveling to campuses and speaking in front of students. As Singer-
man puts it, “I cast the visiting artist as the artist who speaks, or at least the
figure who stands here for the issue of language in the university.”15 Sing-
erman discusses Chris Burden’s piece Shadow as an instance of the visiting
artist as performer, arguing that the work “insists on the logic of the index,
the framing and representation of presence through its double.”16 Clearly
in such a performance, the indexical sign—Burden’s own shadow cast on a
screen between himself and the faculty audience—is supplemented by the
artist’s speech. Given, too, that Burden parodied the appearance of an avant-
garde artist by wearing a black cap, striped T-shirt, and fatigue jacket, it may
be said that Shadow, just like the work by the Jackson Pollock Bar, belongs to
the studio genre, in that it enacts in a teaching studio a work that theorizes
its own practice.
What is immediately striking in the case of the visiting artist is that the
practices of the indexical sign seem at home in the university of excellence
inasmuch as they both lack content. That is not to say that excellence is the
appropriate measure of postmodern art, merely that their coincidence in-
vites comparison. We might note, for example, that the absence of a model
against which a student’s efforts may be judged—whether this be present in
the more traditional studio as a cast to be copied, or simply present in the
teacher’s mind as a recognized way of improving work in progress—is anal-
ogous to that of an external cultural referent for the university as such. We
can pursue this comparison further by returning to Readings’s discussion of
1968, which he too regards as a turning point—one in which the student’s
identity is both realized and provisional: “1968 marks the entry of the stu-
dent body into the sphere of the University, an entry that meant the Univer-
sity could no longer be understood in terms of the story of an individual’s
subject’s passage through it.”17 The reference here is to bildung—the concept
that names the personal journey of an individual from youth to maturity in
terms of the development of character through learning. As such it mirrors
the unity of the national culture in the unity of the individual while at the
same time transforming that individual’s personal ambition in the light of
the wider culture. For Singerman, the personal narrative of bildung guided
the artist and student of Abstract Expressionism. Here, the journey is one
of chance encounters in which the artist or student emerges as essentially
self-taught. This becoming-an-artist is nothing less than the subject of Ab-
stract Expressionism, as Singerman explains: “In this [teaching] scenario the
assignment does not help the student access his or her subjectivity, a deep,
personal inner well; rather it produces a subjectivity, or at least the effects and
the emptiness of one.”18
The students of 1968, Readings argues, rejected the narrative of bildung
“in the name of an uncertainty”: an uncertainty of maturity, labor, wealth,
class, and gender.19 Likewise, Singerman shows that where the student of

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 44   Belshaw

Abstract Expressionism was “taught” refusal—a constant rejection of the

known or, as Harold Rosenberg, writing in the early 1950s, put it, “it’s not
that, it’s not that, it’s not that”20—the student of the index has constantly
to defer meaning in an endless process of “one thing after another.”21 This
sheer absence of content turns out to be the forward dynamic of the stu-
dent’s narrative. That is to say, student work, like the readymade, is always
potential work, and, to the extent that he or she is narrated by the degree
program, what goes for the work goes for the student. As Singerman ex-
plains: “The MFA makes artists in the same way the artist makes art in the
image of the readymade, as a matter of linguistic convention, according to
a legal contract—or approaching one—and certainly within an institutional
discourse.”22 This, of course, does not mean that the student can simply be
“baptized” in the manner of the readymade, rather that in the absence of
any assessable skills or recognized criteria, a student’s becoming an artist
can only be explained in terms of the institution. We can pursue this rather
bleak idea by returning to the notion of the student-artist as a kind of fiction,
and this, in turn, should help us address the problems of the index outlined
above. To do this we will consider ways in which artists and authors can be
said to be produced by their own work.
It is a commonplace in literary studies to speak of an implied author, a
figure that does not stand as an authorial identity with regard to the work’s
meaning but rather one that is produced by the text when read. As the lit-
erary theorist Wayne Booth put it some fifty years ago, “It is only by dis-
tinguishing between the author and his implied image that we can avoid
pointless and unverifiable talk about such qualities as ‘sincerity’ and ‘seri-
ousness’ in the author.”23 A similar though less frequently acknowledged ar-
gument appears in art writing. In the absence of a valid explanation of how
we can account for the artist as the source of expression in a work, it may be
said that the artist is likewise implied by the work. For example, Fred Or-
ton states, “‘Jasper Johns’ names the imaginary or symbolic character who
stands in a causal relation with the works, who is their producer and who
enables their inscription in discourse even as they and their inscription in
discourse produce him.”24 This “figuring” of the artist was also proposed
by Rosenberg in discussing the subjectivity of the American action-painters,
when he observed the “man may be over forty, the painter around seven.”25
Seen in this way, such figures of the author or artist are not only produced
by their work but also by the exegesis that follows. Yet some authors and
some artists make the fictional self an explicit effect of the work as such.
Broodthaers’s fictional identity as director of his Museum of Modern Art is
perhaps the best-known instance in art, though the recent interest in “au-
tofiction” has drawn attention to practices of a similar kind.26 In literature,
too, the writing of autobiography, which may at first appear to be a factual
account of a real person’s life, on closer inspection is seen to produce the

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 Fictions of the Studio   45

a­ uthor-in-the-text. The effect is of a radical distinction between the ­fictional

author and the person writing the book, a distinction that also emerges
when the provisional identity of the student is seen against the background
of the university degree course, as we will now see.
All degree courses can be seen to have a kind of narrative structure or
plot. They are so constructed as to reveal at a glance the progress a student
is expected to make over a three-year period, where each year is in turn sub-
divided into terms or semesters, like the chapters of a novel. Moreover, the
overall structure is inescapably understood according to the classic Aristote-
lian scheme of beginning, middle, and end. Seen in pedagogical terms, this
is simply a practical way of organizing the process of teaching and learning
to achieve the desired outcome—the student’s successful completion of the
course. This is, of course, the “law” of the university’s aim. However, if we
agree with Broodthaers’s view that “fiction enables us to grasp reality and
at the same time that which is veiled by reality,” we might begin to fill out
the roles of this narrative by thinking of the student as a kind of protago-
nist.27 In spite of the demise of the bildung narrative that we saw earlier, the
student is nonetheless the pivotal figure in relation to whom the events of
the narrative carry meaning. Those events are in this case narrated by the
teacher, whose duty it is to oversee the student’s development by drawing
comparisons from one work to the next and evaluating progress at a given
point. Even though the student is also obliged to speak, it is the teacher
who makes sense of that speech in the wider context of studio discourse,
measuring this against work in progress. If the teacher is the narrator in this
story, should we not think of the university as author? As we have seen, the
authorial self-consciousness of the institution is one of the consequences of
the university of excellence. And while the teacher engages the student in a
crit, the language, and in a sense the voice, remain that of the university.
The upshot of this hierarchy of language is that the university, in order to
function, must take the student’s account of his or her own work as candid,
authentic, and transparent; we can recall here Booth’s doubts about the “sin-
cere” and “serious” author. Some such assumptions must underwrite the
teacher’s record of a student’s progress if it is to appear valid. The student,
that is, must be regarded as a named and autonomous, individual author
of a body of work if an assessment consistent with the institution’s notion
of excellence is to be made. To put the same point in reverse, if the student
is thought to be acting a role and treating the crit as the work itself, then
the teacher’s purchase on the situation is compromised, much like the dif-
ficulty Harrison faced with the painting discussed earlier. Under such con-
ditions, the language of criticism becomes opaque. Thus, what the fiction of
the teaching studio reveals is the nature of the narrative sketched out above.
That is to say, when obscured, the procedures of teaching are assumed to
be natural, given as the inevitable order of things. Bringing them to light

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 46   Belshaw

does not necessarily institute a different kind of pedagogy; rather, it shows

a given reality to be staged in a certain way. In terms of contemporary art
practice, this amounts to a kind of institutional critique.
To anyone who has read James Elkins’s book Why Art Cannot Be Taught,
something of the argument I have outlined may sound familiar. What El-
kins proposes as “whimsical ideas” under the heading “Tinkering with
Critiques” is a list of suggestions that students and teachers are invited to
take up during a crit. All of the suggestions play fast and loose with the
“authentic” situation of the crit and encourage a more “effective and clear”
approach as a way to redress the otherwise familiar routine.28 One of the
suggestions to students goes as follows: “Borrow your opening speech from
someone else. Present that person’s concerns to your teachers, as though his
or her interests were your own interests.”29 Presenting someone’s concerns
as one’s own would have the positive effect of leading the student to a more
acute realization of his or her practice by mobilizing a lie in the interests
of greater illumination of the truth. Such a strategy is clearly an effective
means to a desirable end: “The idea is to learn more about how you and
your work are seen, by changing something about yourself or your art. If
these strategies work, they will tell you something about how to control
viewers’ responses—always an important thing to know if you’re serious
about becoming an artist.”30
Although there is an invitation to pretence in Elkins’s discussion in
the form of a proposed, fictionalized encounter between student and tu-
tor, the focus of this undoubtedly useful pragmatic advice lies squarely
on the local situation of the crit rather than the wider institutional issues
discussed by Bloor, Readings, and Singerman. Such strategies may be
adopted and adapted by students wishing to explore the language game
of the scene of teaching. However, to constitute some kind of institution-
al critique would entail a redescription of the circumstances of teaching
and learning.
Just as it was wishful thinking to assume that a “dematerialized” art
would escape the conditions of the art market in the late 1960s, so it would
be naive to think that work motivated by the notion of a fictionalized prac-
tice would elude the system it purports to critique since the university, hav-
ing no other defining model, can, in the end, accommodate every endeavor
to its pursuit of excellence, as Readings explains:

Excellence responds very well to the needs of technological capital-

ism in the production and processing of information, in that it allows
for the increasing integration of all activities into a generalized mar-
ket, while permitting a large degree of flexibility and innovation at
the local level. Excellence is thus the integrating principle that allows
“diversity” (the other watchword of the University prospectus) to be
tolerated without threatening the unity of the system.31

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 Fictions of the Studio   47

The teaching studio is thus a microcosm of this situation in that a diversity

of contemporary art practices is undertaken as student work. This is in step
with the market, where diversity also has a greater chance of survival than
specialization.32 Such undertakings are comfortably integrated into the sys-
tem in which “flexibility and innovation” are valued, but, as we have seen,
unity, which was once the cohesion of the university of culture in the nation-
state, no longer characterizes the university of excellence; it is, in that sense,
an illusion. Thus, the reality that the fiction of the teaching studio reveals
is just that “integrating principle” or “unity” as a fiction. Moreover, that il-
lusion shelters student and teacher alike from being recognized in their in-
stitutional roles and allows them to see each other as autonomous subjects
against the neutral or invisible backdrop of the institution.
We began by asking whether the idea of the teaching studio as fictional
scene might shed light on the teaching of contemporary art practices in the
university, given the indexical character of that art, the university’s principle
of excellence, and their mutual lack of content. Readings’s account showed
that the “university of excellence” lacked content in that it no longer had
a purposeful relation to the wider culture. We saw that Readings’s argu-
ment could usefully be compared with that made by Singerman, inasmuch
as the postmodern fine art program required no subject-specific skills that
could be deemed language-like in their application. This absence, which is
the condition of the indexical sign, was compensated for by the supplement
of verbal language, thus having the effect of rendering work provisional in
that it would always be subject to further commentary. Students of fine art
are routinely required to account for their work, to provide ingenuous wit-
ness to their own efforts and submit them to scrutiny. However, if the de-
gree program is understood as a kind of drama or fictional narrative, and,
likewise, if the student regards him or herself as a protagonist, it will be-
come clear that the content of student work derives from the circumstances
of its production, indexed as it is to a certain ideology of pedagogy. Bloor’s
observation that “the rule itself is part of the currency of interaction, and a
medium of self-understanding” neatly captures the logic of this situation.33
This would contrast with the university’s view that the student be under-
stood as author—that is, as the autonomous and examinable individual
named on the register—and indeed that the teacher be understood as an
autonomous artist. Similarly, to imagine such a fictional scene would be to
imagine a different kind of institutional critique, one that takes the studio
genre as its precedent. Harrison has argued that the studio genre can be re-
garded as a modern version of the high genre of history painting, albeit one
that is suffused with irony and bathos on the grounds that it is a “category
of practice distinguished by the long resonance of its dialectical themes, and
by its immanent critical bearing on the dominant discourses of the age.”34
If that were plausible, could we not expect student work to begin with an

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understanding of the discourses of its production—discourses that would

constitute the practical and theoretical material of the teaching studio?

NOTES

1. Press release for “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Sections Art
Moderne et Publicité” (Kassel, 1972), reprinted in Marcel Broodthaers [exhibition
catalog] (Paris: Jeu de Paume, 1991), 227.
2. The translation was intended to distance the performers from direct meaning of
the dialogue.
3. Art & Language, “Art & Language Paints a Picture (a Fragment)” Gewad Infor-
matief (Ghent, March 1983), in Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing
Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 1020.
4. Ibid., 1019.
5. David Bloor, Wittgenstein, Rules and Institutions (London: Routledge, 2002), 33.
6. Ibid., 33-34.
7. Charles Harrison, Conceptual Art and Painting: Further Essays on Art & Language
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 60-61.
8. Ibid., 64-65.
9. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986), 11.
10. Art & Language, “Art & Language Paints a Picture (a Fragment),” 1020.
11. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999), 13.
12. Ibid., 13.
13. Ibid., 28.
14. Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 156.
15. Ibid., 156.
16. Ibid., 160-62.
17. Readings, The University in Ruins, 144.
18. Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University, 146.
19. Readings, The University in Ruins, 147.
20. Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action-Painters,” Art News (December 1952);
reprinted in Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, ed. David Shapiro and
­Cecile Shapiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 79.
21. Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University, 179.
22. Ibid., 174.
23. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983),
75.
24. Fred Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 14.
25. Rosenberg, “The American Action-Painters,” 79.
26. For a detailed discussion of “autofiction,” see Joost de Bloois, “Introduction.
The Artists Formerly Known as . . . or, the Loose End of Conceptual Art and
the Possibilities of ‘Visual Autofiction,’” Image & Narrative, no. 19 (November
2007), http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/autofiction/debloois.htm
(­accessed May 9, 2009).
27. Press release for “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Sections Art
Moderne et Publicité.”
28. James Elkins, Why Art Cannot Be Taught: A Handbook for Art Students (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2001), 167.
29. Ibid.,168.
30. Ibid., 168.
31. Readings, The University in Ruins, 32.

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32. Art & Language equate the inclusivity of mixed media in contemporary art
forms with the expansion of both the museum and the institutions of higher
education: “The drive to expansion in the contemporary art institution is
­inexorably ­connected to the erosion of boundaries between artistic media—
those ­specialized categories that have traditionally served to contain curatorial
ambition. Similar processes may be seen at work in the institutions of higher
education, where expansion entails erosion of the distinctiveness of disciplinary
subject-matter, and of the detailed study that this tends to require, in favour of
topicality, interdisciplinarity and thematic work responsive to the promptings of
the market.” Art & Language, “A Place to Work,” Museum International 59, no. 3
(2007): 34.
33. Bloor, Wittgenstein, Rules and Institutions, 33.
34. Harrison, Conceptual Art and Painting, 57.

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