30 planet of the arts / october 1997

IDENTITIES

od, Reconsidering the Object: 1965-1975.

Three hangs, three curatorial ideas: one based on the
narrative of minimalist aesthetics, one based on content
issues, text and politics, and one based on materiality
with a broad gesture in the direction of feminist prac-
tices. These three exhibitions of Kelly’s work exemplify
the numerous and unwieldy contradictions evoked by
attempting to orga-
nize the heteroge-
neous practices of
those years. Why has
the notion “conceptu-
alism” come to domi-
nate the historiciza-
tion of work from this
period? Is so-called
conceptual art an aes-
thetic category? And in the encyclopaedic variety of
ideational constructions, materialist practices, and aes-
thetic positions represented by so-called conceptualist
works from so many specific, geographical locations,
how is it possible and why is it necessary to generate a

grandly narrative category?

Defining So-Called Conceptual Art

Without wishing to be reductive, but simply to
establish a discursive starting point, I introduce the idea
that conceptual art was, as much as any other art, about
representation. From that time until this, the conversa-
tions, discussions and arguments about conceptual art
have been primarily about aesthetic questions related to
the production of fine art objects. Was this an anti-aes-
thetic movement, concerned with the “dematerializa-
tion of the object of art,” to use Lippard and Chandler’s
phrase? Is it enough to declare something or to “see
something as” art; to bring what Wollheim, in 1968,
called “an aesthetic attitude” to bear on the looking? Or
is it a necessary condition, as he suggested, that whatev-
er is produced be under the concept of art, in relation to
the ideas and institutions of art?®

My proposition is that the major forms of represen-
tation at that time were action and conversation, and
that the visual objects which were produced paralleled
linguistic representations, in conversation, and behav-
ioural representations, in actions and performances.
When we look at the actual objects which have survived
from that period, the dominant aesthetic derives from
historical, archival and museological documentation —
photographs, bits of detritus, diagrams, written texts,
audio tapes and transcripts of conversations, descrip-
tions and video footage of actions, magazine articles
and personal notes — what Jeff Wall has termed “caskets
of information,’ a kind of Mallarmeanism in which
“social subjects are presented as enigmatic hieroglyphs
and given the authority of the crypt.” Insofar as ques-
tions of production and exhibition inevitably arose, if
one attends to the aesthetics of presentation, minimal-
ism appears to have remained the preferred aesthetic.
However an equally strong case could be made for con-
sideration of many works from the point of view of
Brechtian aesthetics.

In my view, using conceptualism as a totalizing
descriptor for an aesthetic movement is a dilemma in
the face of its varied social, political, philosophical and
intellectual roots and presentation modes. If anything
has been learned from postmodernist discourse, it is
that lumping broadly diverse practices from a multitude
of specific geographical locations under one name is
deeply problematic. Perhaps the most meaningful use of
the term “conceptual art” is as a shorthand notation for
the sheer diversity of practices during the years
1965-1975, except in cases where artists chose it to
describe their own practices, as in the case of Joseph
Kosuth who did not propose it as an epoch-claiming
term, but as a distinguishing one.” If anything, this was
a period in which mental operations were privileged
and modes of production and form were chosen which
had the same provisional existence as the intellectual
skills and cognitive strategies they represented. It was
not an anti-art movement; on the contrary, questions of
representation were central, but it was a utopian
moment in which object-making served ideas with the
hope that Western society could be changed.

In addition to “conceptual art,” a number of other
terms were proposed at the time in order to define the

aesthetic orientation of the period. In an article by

Object-making served
ideas with the hope

that Western society
could be changed.

Leonard B. Meyer in the Hudson Review,|| the term
“radical empiricism” was suggested to describe the avant
garde arts which employed methods and systems
involving chance and accident. Meyer’s claim was that
the procedures for systematically constructing random-
ness were not simply technical tools but were symptoms
of a new aesthetics which undermined our ability to
predict matters of form. He
suggested that this was
anti-teleological and bore a
relationship to Oriental phi-
losophy but only “because
Western art had already devel-
oped ways of perception,
modes of organization and
philosophical attitudes

approximating those of the
Orient...” (174) Meyer believed that, like Heisenberg’s
work in quantum physics, the anti-teleological aesthetic
practices of avant garde artists were a denial of “the the-
oretical possibility of isolating any particular event as
being the cause of another particular event” because
“the world is seen as a single interrelated field or con-
tinuum.” (179) For Meyer, radical.empiricism marked
the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of a move
toward a plurality of aesthetics, each appropriate to its
particular art.

Whether or not one agrees with the term “radical
empiricism,’ Meyer’s work is an important reminder
that conceptualism was rooted in, not one, but a variety
of traditions and forms of abstraction. Cybernetics and
systems theory were widely read and spoken of at this
time in North America and in Europe, and the study
and application of ideas drawn from Eastern philoso-
phies had been evident in the practices of artists and
thinkers in North America, even before the Beat
Generation. These influential ideas of the day are rarely
referred to in historicizations of conceptualism.

Another descriptive term, proposed by Adrian Piper
in 1973 in an article in Art forum,” was “meta-art.” By
meta-art, she meant “the activity of making explicit the
thought process, procedures, and presuppositions of
making whatever kind of art we make?” Meta-art, as
Piper defined it, required “an epistemic self-conscious-
ness” on the part of the artist; “viewing ourselves as the
aesthetic objects we are, then elucidating as fully as pos-
sible the thoughts, procedures, and presuppositions that
so define.” She characterized meta-art as “a cognitive,
self-conscious process which attempts to elucidate the
broad scope of referents which together define the art-
making process over and above the art” (by which she
presumably meant the art object). Piper’s definition
fetishizes the artist as an actor, but it allows considera-
tion of performance and action, as forms of representa-
tion, which are not generally addressed by current his-
toricizations of conceptual art, although they were
clearly a large part of the practices of the day and of

many so-called conceptual artists.

Kelly’s Feminism

For women, and particularly for feminists like Mary
Kelly, this period was unquestionably a radical break
from former times. Medical science had found a practi-
cally perfect method by which women could take charge
of their reproductive functions for the first time in the
history of humankind. While birth control had been
publicly debated in Britain for over a century, it had
never been widely accepted as a method of family plan-
ning and provision of birth control information to
unmarried women was still considered taboo. In coun-
tries like Canada, the provision of information about
birth control, even to married women, was illegal under
the Criminal Code until the late 1960’s. With the legal-
ization and wide availability of the birth control pill, the
attention of women turned to redefining feminine sub-
jectivity in light of these new conditions for self-deter-
mination in relation to reproduction and the family.
Kelly’s Post-Partum Document, an undeniably conceptu-
alist work, based on her reading and application of psy-
choanalytic theory, was a contemporary study of moth-
erhood after choice. Its politics and aesthetics were spe-
cific to the time, to the place and to the issue. In
attempting to define her own practice at that time, in
hindsight, Kelly has argued that Post-Partum Document
followed the metadiscursiveness of the 1960’s. But what

she had assumed to be inevitable — that the prevailing

interrogations would necessarily include the question of the subject and the construction of

sexual difference — was not the case. “Although there was a move to extend the analytical

method beyond the exclusive parameter of aesthetics, it stopped dramatically short of synthe-

sizing the subjective moment into that inquiry.

wl4

Two other works by Kelly overlapped with the research period for Post-Partum Document

and greatly influenced it. One was Women and Work, with Kay Hunt and Margaret Harrison,

and the other was Nightcleaners, a film produced with Mark Karlin and the Berwick Street Film

Collective. The latter is a gritty, feature-length documentary, much influenced by Brechtian

aesthetics, which followed the campaign by members of the Women’s Liberation movement in

1972 to unionize working class women, employed by janitorial companies to clean office build-

ings, during the night, in the City of London. The former — Women and Work — was an analy-

sis of the division of labour in a metal box factory at the time of the introduction of Equal Pay

legislation in Britain. First installed at the South London Gallery, near the location of the fac-

tory, Women and Work clarified differences in the relationships of men and women to the

workplace as well as the fact that “women’s unpaid work in the home not only maintains the

labour force in the physical sense, but also, mediates the relations of production through the

ideology of the family”?

Kelly has ascribed this work fundamental importance as the stimulus

for questions addressed by the Post-Partum Document. She described Women and Work as

..a document on the division of labour in a specific industry, showing the changes in

the labour process and the constitution of the labour force during the implementa-

tion of the Equal Pay Act. At the same time we were discovering how the division of

labour in industry was underpinned by the division of labour in the home and that

= . . 1
the central issue for women was in fact reproduction.

6

Central to women, central to Women’s Liberation, central to women’s place in society and

in the workplace and central to Kelly herself, as an artist, a teacher and a mother, reproductive

rights took precedence over other forms of institutional and structural social critique for

. Tom Conley, “Translator’s Introduction: For a
Literary Historiography,” introduction to The
Writing of History by Michel de Certeau, New
York: Columbia University Press (1988):viii.

. see pages 17-18.

. Mary Kelly Trabulsi; Painted Reliefs, exhibition
invitation, Jafet Memorial Library, American
University of Beirut, June 21 — July 5, 1968.

4. J.G., Arts Review, London (April 25, 1970).

. Shrew, special double issue (December
1970):2-5.

6. The report was named for the Chair of the
National Advisory Council on Art Education,
Sir William Coldstream of the Slade School of
Art. It was recently reported to me by Lynda
Morris, Director of the Norwich Art Gallery,
that Coldstream had quipped that it should
have been called the Pasmore Report after task
force member, Victor Pasmore, who had pre-
sumably had a strong influence on the direction
of the report’s recommendations. First Report of
the National Advisory Council on Art Education,
Ministry of Education, London: Her Majesty’s
Stationery Office (1960).

. See Charles Madge and Barbara Weinberger, Art
Students Observed, London: Faber and Faber
(1973) and Philip Pilkington, Kevin Lole and
David Rushton, “Some concerns in fine art edu-
cation,’Studio International, 183:937 (October
1971):120-121.

nN

w

N

Notes
. Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects,

10.

continued on page 32, see “Mary Kelly”

Middlesex, England: Penguin Books (1975), first
published by Harper & Row (1968).

. Jeff Wall, Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel, Toronto:

Art Metropole (1991):19.

Joseph Kosuth, “Art After Philosophy,” Parts 1, 2
& 3 in Studio International, 178:915 (October,
1969): 134-137, 178:916 (November, 1969):
160-161 and 178:917 (December, 1969):
212-213.

. Leonard B. Meyer, “The End of the

Renaissance?: Notes on the Radical Empiricism
of the Avant-Garde,” The Hudson Review, 16:2
(Summer, 1963): 169-186.

. Adrian Piper, “In Support of Meta-Art,”

Artforum, 12:2 (October, 1973):79-81.

. Ibid.:79.
. Mary Kelly, “Introduction: Remembering,

Repeating and Working-Through,” Imaging
Desire, Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press
(1997):xx.

. “Women’s Workshop/Artists Union,” Spare Rib,

29(1974):40. Also cited in Framing Feminism:
Art and the Women’s Movement 1970-85, eds.
Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock,
London/NY: Pandora Press (1987).

. Laura Mulvey, “Post Partum Document by Mary

Kelly,” cited as III.9, 1976 Dossier: “Post Partum
Document (1) in Parker and Pollock, op.
cit.:203. Originally appeared in Spare Rib, 53,
London (1976):40.

Women and Art course, 1974

30 plonet of the orts / october 1997

IDENTITIES

od, Reconsidering the Object 1965-1
“Three hangs, thre curatorial ideas one base onthe
narrative of minimalist aesthetics one based on content

ites, text and politics and one basedon materiality
witha broad gesture inthe direction of feminist prac

tices. These theee exhibitions of Kelly's work exempliy

the numerous and unwieldy contradictions evoked by
attempting 10 orgs

nize the heteroge
rcous practices of
those years. Why has
the notion “concept
alia come to domi
nate the histricia
tion of work fom this
period? Is sorcaled
conceptual art anaes
thetic category? And in the encyclopaedic variety of
‘deational constructions materialist practices, and aes
thetic postions represented by soled concepualis
works from so many specific, geographical locations,
howe st possible and why ist necesary to generate a
grandly narativ category?

Defining So-Called Conceptual Art

Without wishing to be reductive, but simply t0
cstablish discursive starting point, introduce the idea
‘hat conceptual art was as much as anyother a, about

representation. From that time until this the convers

tions, discussions and arguments about conceptual art

have been primarily about aesthetic questions related 19
the production of fine art objects Was this an ant-aes:
thetic movement, concerned with the “demateraiza
tion ofthe objec of arto use Lippard and Chandler's
Pras? Is it enough to delae something or to “sce
something as” art; to bring what Wollicim, in 1968,
‘called “an aesthetic attitude” to bear onthe looking? Or
isita necessary condition ashe sugested that whatev

ris produced be under the concept of arin relation to
the ideas and instvtions of ar?

My proposition i thatthe major forms of represen
tation at that time were action and conversation, and
thatthe visual object which were produced paralleled
linguistic representations, in conversation, and behav
‘oural representation, in actions and performances.
When we look at the actual objects which have survived
fiom that period, the dominant aesthetic derives fom
historia, archival and muscological documentation —
Photographs, bits of dteits, diagrams, writen texts
audio tapes and transcripts of conversations, descrip

tions and video footage of actions, magazine

and personal notes ~ what Jeff Wall has termed “caskets
‘of information,” a kind of Mallarmeanism in which
soil subject are presented as enigmatic hieroglyphs
and given the authority ofthe crypt” Insofar as ques
tions of production and exhibition inevitably arose, if
lone attends to the aesthetics of presentation, minimal-
ism appears to ave remained the preferred aesthetic.
However an quay strong case could be made for con
sideration of many works from the point of view of
Breehtian aesthetics

In my view, using conceptualism as 2 totalizing

eseriptor for an aesthetic movement i a dilemma in

the face of its varied sca politcal philosophical and
imellectal rots and presentation modes anything
hasbeen learned from postmodernist dicouns i is
that lumping broadly diese practi fom a multe
of specif geographical lotions under one name is
deeply problematic. haps the most meaning use of
the ter "conceptual art" asa shorthand notation for
the sheer diversity of practices

195-975, eel in cases where ass chose i 0
describe their own practi, ai the eve of Joseph
Konuth who di not propose ita an epoch
ter, but aa distinguishing one. anything hiss
4 period in which mental operations were pri

and modes of production and form were chosen which
ad the same provisional existence ab the inlet
skills and cognitive strategies they represented. I was
not an ant-art movement onthe conta, questions of
representation were central, but it was 3 utopian
nomen in which objet-making served ideas withthe
hope tha Wester society could be changed

ing the years

ed

In addition t "conceptual ar.” a number of other
terms were proposed atthe time in order to define the

acthete ofentation of the period. In an article by

Object-making served
ideas with the hope
that Western society

could be changed.

Leonard B, Meyer in the Hudson Review." the term

‘radical empiricism” was suggested to describe the avant
girde arts which employed methods and systems
involving chance and accident. Meyer's clam as that
the procedures for sjtematially constructing random
‘ess were not simply technical tools but were symptoms
of anew aesthetics which undermined our ability to
predict. matters of form. He
suggested that this was
ant-teeological and bore a
relationship to Oriental phi
losophy but only
‘Wester art had aleady deve
coped ways of perception,
modes of organization and
philosophical

because

awitudes
approximating those of the
(Orient. (174) Meyer believed that, ike Heisenberg’
‘work in quantum physics, the ant-eleological aesthetic
practices of avant garde artists were a denial ofthe the
‘retical possibly of isolating any pas
being the cause of another panicular event” because
the world is sen a a single interrelated field or con
tinuum” (179) For Meyer; radical empiricism marked
the end ofthe Renaissance and
toward a platy of aesthetics, each appropriate to its

beg

1gofa move

particular art.
Whether or not one agrees with the term “add
empiricism,” Meyers work is an important reminder
that conceptulism was rooted in, not one, but a varity
of trations and forms of abstraction. Cyberntics and
systems theory were widely read and spoken of at this
time in North America and in Europ
and application of ideas drawn from Easter philoso
Phies had been evident in the practices of artists and

and the study

thinkers in North America, even before the Beat
Generation. These inflaential ideas of the day are rarely
referred to in istorczations of conceptuaism

Another descriptive term, proposed by Ade

n Piper
{in 473 in an article in Art forums! was “meta-art.” By
She meant “the activity of making explicit the
thought process, procedures, and presuppositions of
making whatever kind of art we make" Metaar, as
Piper defined it, required “an epistemic self-conscious:
nes” on the part of the artis; "viewing ourselves asthe
aesthetic objects we re, then elucidating as ally s pos
sible the thoughts, procedures and presuppositions that

0 define” She characterized meta-art as “a cogitv,
self-conscious process which attempts 4 clucidate the
broad scope of referents which together define the art
making process over and above the art (by which she
presumably meant the art objet). Pipers definition
fetishires the ats san actor, but it allows consider:
tion of performance and action 8 forms of represents
tion, which are not generally addressed by current his
toricizatons of conceptual at, although they were
‘early a large part ofthe practices ofthe day and of

‘many so-called conceptual atts.

Kelly's Feminism

For women, and particularly for feminists ike Mary
Kelly this period was unquestionably a radical break
from former times Medical science ha found a practi
«ally perfect method by which women could take charge
‘oftheir reproductive functions for the ist time inthe
history of humankind. While birth control had been
publicly debated in Britain for over a century, it had
ever been widely acepted asa method of family plan
fing and provision of birth control information to

sarcied women was sill considered taboo In coun

tees like Canada, the provision of information about

birth contol even to married women, wasilegal
‘the Criminal Cade until the late 1960. With the legal
faaton and wide availabilty ofthe birth control ilk the
attention of women turned to redefining feminine sub
jecivity in light of these new conditions for sf-ter
mination in relation to reproduction and the family.
Kelly’ Post- Partum Document an undeniably concept
alist work, based on her reang and application of py
choanalytic theory, was contemporary study of moth
«ood after choice ls politics and aesthetics wer spe
cic tthe time, tothe place and to the ise. In
tempting to define her own practice at that ime, i

hindsight, Kelly has argued that Post Partum Document

followed the metadncusivenes ofthe 1960's. But what

she had assumed tobe inevitable ~ thatthe prevailing

imterogations would necessarily ince the question of the subject and the construction of

was not the case. “Although there was a move to extend the analytical
method beyond the éxclusive parameter of aesthetics, t topped dramatically short of synthe-
sizing the subjective moment into that inquiry"

“Two other works by Kelly overlapped with the rescarch period for Ps-Partum Document
and greatly influenced i, One was Women and Work with Kay Hunt and Margaret Harrison,
and the other was Nightlaners a lm produced with Mark Kalin and the Berwick Street Film
Collective. The later isa rity, feature-length documentary, much influenced by Brechtian
aesthetics, which followed the campaign by members ofthe Women’ Liberation movement in
1972 to unionize working clas women, employed by janitorial companies to clean ofice build

sexual diference

Jing, during the night, inthe City of London. The former ~ Women and Work ~ was an analy
sis ofthe dvi
legislation in Britain. Fist installed at the South London Gallery, near
tory, Women and Work clarified diferencs in the relationships of men and women t the
workplace as wells the fac that “women's unpaid work in the ome not only maintains the
labour force in the physical sense, but also, mediates the relations of production through the
ideology ofthe family Kelly as ascribed this work fundamental importance asthe stimils
for questions addressed by the Pot-artum Document She described Women and Work as
4 document onthe division of about ina specific industry, showing the changes in
the labour proces andthe consttton ofthe abou force during the implements

n of labour ina metal box factory tthe time ofthe introduction of Equal Pay

3 location ofthe fe

tion ofthe Equal Pay Act. tthe same me we mee discovering how the divson of
[nbour in industry was underpinned bythe division of labour inthe home and that
‘he centralise for women wasn ft reproduction.”
Central to women central to Women's Liberation, central to women’s place in society and
in the workplace and central to Kelly herself aban artist teacher and a mothe, eproductve
rights took precedence over other forms of institutional and structural socal eitique for

comms on page 9.50 at”

Notes
Lary Holography inroduction wo Misr Englands Penguin Books (1975) fet
Ak: Columba Uesty Pres (198 9. Kft Wl, Da Gon Karmen Toronta

i

ben cle the Por Report fr ak 1A Mary Kelly iron: Remembering
the arta Airy Comentario’ Sp
WIM Ged a eee 208i append nS Bk