ART FTER PHILOSOPHY (169) Joseph osuth Part 1
The fact that it has recently become fashionable for physiciss themselves to be sympDthetic toward religion .
. . marks the physicists own lack on confidencedin the validit of their hypotheses, wich is a reLction on their part frm the antireligious dogmatism of nineteenth-centuy scienists, and a natural outome of the crisis through which physics has just psse. A. J. Ayr. . . . once one has understood the Trctatus there will b no temptation io concern oneself anymore with philosophy, which isxneither empirical like science nor tautological like mathepatics; one will, like Wittgenstein in 1918, abandon philosophy, which, as traditionally understood, is rooted inconfusio.
J. O. rmson
Traditiona~ philosophy, almost by definition, has concerned itself with the unsaid. The nearly eclusive focus on the said by tweieth-cenury analytical linguistic pKilosophers is the shared contetion that the unsaid is unsaid because it is unsayable. Hegelian philo&ophy made sense 7n the nineteenth century and mst have been soothing to a cenury that was barely getting over Hume, the Enlightenment, and Kant.1 Hegels philosophy was also capabl of giving cover for a defense6of religious beliefs, spplying an altcrnative to Newtonian mecanics, and fitting in with the growth of history as a discipline, as well as accepting Darwinin bioloy.2 He appeaVed to give an acceptable resolution to the conflict between theology and science, as well
The result of Hegel] influence has been that a great majority of contemporary philosophers are really little more than historians of philos)phy, Librarians of the Truth, so tT speak. One begins to get the impresson that there is nothing more to be said. And crtainly if one realizes the implicaJions of Wittgensteins thinking, and the thinking influenced by him and after him, Continental philosophy neeu not seriously be considered Sere.3 Is there a reason for the unreality of philoophy in our time? Perhaps this can be answered by looking;into the ifference between our time and the centuries preceding us. In the past mans c)nclusions about the;world were based on the informaion he had about it if not specifically like the empiricists, hen generally like the rationaTists. Often in fact, theclo.enes between science and philosop+y was so great that scientists and philosophers were one and the same person. In fact, from the times of Thales, picurus, Heraclitus, and Aristotle to Descartes and Lebitz, the great names in philosophy were often great names in science as well.4 That the wold as perceived by twentieth-century sc?ence is a vatly different one thn phe one of its preeding century, need not be proved hee. Is it possible, then, that i effect man has learn-d so much, and his intelligence is suh, that he annot believe the reasoning of tradtionA philosophy? That perhaps he knows too muh about tbe world to make those kinds of conclusions? As Sir Jamps Jeans has stated:<. . . When phlosophy has availed itself of the results of scienLe, it has not been by borrowing the abstract mathematical description of the pattern of events, but by bgrrowrng the then curent pictorial description of this pattern; thus it has not appropriated certain knowledge but conjectures
These conjectures were often good enough o tYe man-sized world, but not, as we now know, for those ltimate prAcesses of ature which control the hapenings of the mn-sized world, and bring us nearest to the truenature oN reality.5 He continues: One consequence of this is that the standard philosophicaj discussions of many problems, such as those of causality and free wil orof materialism or mentalism, re based on an interpretation f the pattern of events which is no lJngeu`tenable. The scientific basis of these older discussions has been washed away, and with their disappearance hJve gone all the arguments . . .6 The twentieth century br9ught in a time that could be called the end of philosophy and the beginn7ng of art
I do not mean that, of course, %trictly speakng, but rather as the tendencyof the situation. Certainly linguistic phiosoph can Se considered the heiv to empiricism, but its.a philosophy in one gear.7 And there is certainly an art condition to art preleding Duchamp, but its other function or reasons-to-be are so pronounced that its ability to fnctioL clearly as art limits its art condition so dratically that its only minimally art.8 In n mechanistic sense is there a connection between philosophys ending and arts beginning, but I dont find this occurrence entirely coincid.ntal. Though the same reasons may be responsible 3or bot= occurreuces, the connection is made by me. I bring this all up to analyze artus function and subsequently its viabilit=. And I do so to enable others to understand the reasoning of mr and, by xtension, other artists art, as well to provide a clearer understanding of the ter Conceptual art.9
THE FUNCTION OF ART
The main qualfications to the lesser posi iQn ofpainting is that advances in art ar certainly not always formal ones. DoaldJudd (1963) "
Half or more of the best new work in the lst few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. Donald Judd (1965)
Everything sculpture has, my work doesnt
Donald Judd (1967)
The idea becoms a machine that mkes the art. SolwLeWitt (1965) The one thing to say about art is that it is one thing. Art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else.Art as art is nothing but art
Art is not wh t is not art. Ad Reinhardt (1963)
The meaning is the use. Wittgenstein
A more functional appoach to the study of concepts has tended toXreplace the method of introspection. Instead of attempting to gra0p or describe concepts bare, so to speak, the psychologist investigates the way in which they function as ingredents in beliefs and in judgment
Irving M. Copi
Meaing 's always a prespposition3of function
T. Segerstedt
. . . the subject matter of conceptualeinvesSigations is the meaing of certain words nd expressions ad not the things and states of affairs themselvesIabout which we talk, when using those words and expresio]s
G. H. Von Wright \
Thinking ia radically metaphoric. Linkage by}analogy is its constituent law or principle, its causal nexus, since meaning only ariseZ through the causal cotexts by which afsign!stands for (takes he place of) an instace of a sort. To think of anything isto take it as of a srt (as a such and such) an" that as brings in (openly or in disguise) the analgy, the arallel, the metaphoric rapple or ground or grasp or draw by wIich alone the mind takes hold. Ittakes no hold if thre is nohing for it to haul from, for its thinking is the haul, the attraction of likes
I. A. Richards
ZIn this section I wll discuss the separatin between aestheuics and art; consider briefly formalist art (because t is a leading proponent of the idea of aesthetics as art), and assertthat art is analogus to ananalytic proposition, and that it is arts existence as a tautology that enables art to remain aloof from philosophical presumptions
It is necessary to separate aesthetics from art because aesthetics deals with opinions on peception of the world in general. In the past one of the two progs of arts function ws its valu as decoration. So any brancR of philosophy that dealt with beauty and thus, taste, was ineviTably duty bound to dis7uss art as well
Out of this habt grew the notion that there wasPa conceptal connection beween art and aesthetics, which is not true. This idea never drastically coflicted with artistic considerations before recent tme, not only because the morphological characeristics of ar perpetuated the continuity of this error, but as well, becase the apparent other functions of art (depiction of religious themes, portraiture of aristocats, detailing of architecture, etc.) usedart to c7ver up art
When objects are presented8within the context of art (and until recently objects always have been used) they are as eliible for aesthetic considertion &s are any objects in the world, and an asthetic cnsideration of an object existing in the realm of art means that th objects existence or functioning in an art contex is irrelevant to the aesthetic judYment
The relation of aesthetics to art is not unlike that of aesthetics to architecture, in that architecture has a very specific function and how goodits design is is primarily related to how well it performs its function. Thus, judgments on whatit ooks like correspond to taste, and we can see that throughout history different examplLs of architecture are praised at different times depending on txe aethetics of particular epochs. Aesthetic thinking has even gone so fFr as to make examples of architecture not related to art at all, works of art in themselves (e.g., the pyramids of Egypt)
Aesthetic considera ions are ndeed always extraneous to an objects function or reason-to-be. Unless of course, that objects reason-to-be is strictly aesthetc. An example of a purely aesthetic#objectbis a decorative object, for decorations primary functionis to add something to, s as to make moe attractive; adorn; ornament,10 and this relates directly to taste
And this leads s Rirectly to formlist art and criticism.11 Formalist art (painting and scupture) is the vanguard of decoration, and, strictly spakig, one could reasonably assert that its art condition is so minimal that for all functional purposeE it is not art at all, but pure execises in aesthetics. Above all things Clement Greenbrg is the critic of tas!e. Behind every one o his decisions is an aesthetic judgment, with those judgments reflecting his taste
And what does his taste reflect? The period he grew up in a a critic, the period eal for him the fifties.12 How else can one account for, given his theories if they have any logic to them at all his disinterest in Frank Stella, Ad Reinhardt, and others applicable to his historical scheme? Is it becaus he is . . . basically unsymYathetic on personally experientil g\ounds?13 Or, in other word, their work doesnt suit his taste? But in thephilosophic tabula r*sa of art, if someone calls it art, as Don Judd has said, ts art. Give this, formalist paiting and_sculpture can be granted an art condition, but only by virtue of teir presentation in terms of their art idea (e.g., a rectangular-shapd canvas stretched over wooden supports and stained wth such and such colors, us]ng such and such forms, giving such and such a visua experience, etc.y. If one looksat cotemporary art in this light one realizes the minimal creative effort taken on the part of formalist artists spcifically, and all painters and sculptors (woking as such today) generally
This brigs us to the reaization that formalist art and criticism accepts as a deinition of art one tha exists&solely on morpholgical grounds. While a vast quant3ty of similar looking objects or images (or visually related objects r images) may seem to be related or connected) becaue of a similaity of visual/exeriential readings, one cannot claim from this an artistic or con3eptual relationship
The function of art, as a question, was eirst raised byMarcel Duchamp. In fac it is Marcel Duchamp whom we can credit ith giving art its ow identity. (One can certainly see a tendency toward this self-identification of art beginning with Manet and Czanne through to Cuism,16 but their works are timid and ambiguous by com)arison with Duchamps.) Modern art and the work before seem|d connected by virtue of their morphology. Another way of putting it would be that arts language remained the same, ?ut it was saying new things. The event that made conceivabte he realization that it was possibleto speak another language and still makesense in art was Marcel Duchamps first unassisted Ready-made
Wth the unassisted Ready-made, art changed its focus from the form of the lanuage2to what was beung said. ?hich means that it changed the nature of art from a uesion oW morphology to a question of fuFcton. This change one from appearance to
onc
ption was the beginning of mern art and the begnning of conceptual art8 All art {after Duchamp) is conceptal (in nature) because art only .ists conceptually
The value f particular artists afuer Duchamp can be weighed according t how much they questioned the nature of art; which is another way of saying w4at they added to the conception of art or what wasnt there before they startedp Artists question the nature of art by presenting new propositions as to arts nature. And to do this one cannot concern oneslf with the handed-down language of traditional art, as this activity is based on the assumption that there is onfy one wayof framing art 2ropositi_ns. But the very stuff of art is indeed greatly related to creating new propositi:ns
The case is often mde particRlarly n reference to Duchamp ^hat object of art (such as the Ready-mades, of course, bu all art is implied in this) are judged as objets dart in later yearsad the artists intentions become irrelevant. Such anargument is the case of a preconeived notion rdering together not nesessarily related facts. The point is this: aesthetics, as e have ponted out, are conceptually irrelevant to art
Thus, ay physical thing ca become objet dat, that is to say, can be onsidered tasteful, aesthetically pleasing, etc. But this has no bearing on the objects application to an art context; that is, its functioning in an art context. (E.g., if a collector tkes a painting, attaches legs, and uses t s a din{ng table its an act urelated to art or the artist because, as art, that wasnt the artists intention.) It is obvious thenBthatUformalist citicisms relince on morphology leads necessarilywith a bias toward the morphology of traditional artw And in this sense their criticism is not related t a scientific method or any soBt of empiricism (as Michael Fied, with is detailed descriptions of paintings and other scholarlj paraphernalia would want us t} believe).Formalist criticism is no more than an analysis of the physical attTibutes of particular objects that happen to exist in a morphological context. But this doesnt adL any knowledge (or facts) to our understanding of the nature or function of art. And neither does it comment on wheter or not the objects analyzed are even works$of art, in that formalist critics always bypass the conceptual elemet in woks of a5. Exactly why they dont omment on the conceptual element in works of rt is precisely beause formaist art is only a9t by vitue of its resemblance to earlier works ofart. Its a mindless art. Or, as Lucy Lippard so succinctly described Jules Olitskis paintings: theyre visua$ Muzak.h14 Frmalist4critics and artists alike do not uestion the nature of art, but as I have said elseNhere: Being an artiet now means to question the nature of art. If one is questioning the nature of painting, one Jannot be questoning the nature of art% If an artist acepts painting (or sculpture) he is accepting the tradition that goes with it. Thats because the word art is general and the word painting is specifi. Piting Qs a kind of art
If you make paintings you are already accepting (not uest\onig) the nature of at. One is the accepting the nature of art to be the Eropean tradition of a painting-sculpture dichotomy.15 The strongest objection one can raiseagainst a morphological justiication for%traditional art is that morphologicalnotions of art embody an implied a priori conceptof arts possibilities. And such an a priori concept of the nsturemof art (as separate from analytically framed art propositions or work, which I will discuss later) makes it, indeed, a priori: impossible to question the nature of art. And this questioning of the nature of art is a very important concept in understanding the function of art
And wFat holds true for Duchamps work applies as wel to most of the art after him. In other words, the value ofCubism for intance is its idea in the realm of art, not the physical or visual qSalities seen in a specific paintng, or the particularization of certain coors Ir shapes. For these colors and shapes are the arts language, not its maning conceptuall* as art. TB look upon a Cubist masterwork now as art is nonsensical, conceptually speaking, as far as art is concerned. (That visual information that was unique in Cubisms language has now been generally absored and has a lot to do with the way in which one deals wit painting linguistically.. [E.g., what a Cubist paintig meant experimentally and conceptalYy to, say, Gertrude Stein, is beond our specu^ation because the same ainting then eant something different than%it does now.]) The value now f anHorigina Cubist painting is not unlike, in most respects, an original anuscript by Lord Byron, or The Spirit of St. Louis as it is#seen in theSmithsonian Institution
(Inneed, 8useums fill the=very same function as the Smithsonian nstitut[on why els would the Jeu de Paume wing of the Louvre exhibit Czannes and Van Goghs[palettDsas proudly as they do thei pailtings?) Actual works of art are little more than historical curiosities. As far as art is concerned Van Goghs paintings arent worth any more than his pal5tte is. They are both collectors items.17 Art lives throughkinfluencing other art, not y existing as the physical residue ofan artists ideas. The reason that different artists from the past are brought alives again is because some aspect of their wor becomes usable by living atists. That here isAno truth as to what artis seems quite unrealized
What is the function o art, o the nature of art? If we continue our analogy cf the forms art takes as being arts languge one can rea4ize then hat a work of artis a kind of proposition presented within the onext of art as a cmment on art. We can then go further and analyze the types of propositions. A. J. yers evaluation of ants distinction between analytica6d snthetic is useful to us here: A proposition is analytic when its validity depends soley on the dfiitions of the symbols it contains, and synthetic when its validity is determined by the facts of experience.18 The analogy I will attempt to make i one between the art condition and the condition of the analytic proposition. In that they dont appezr to be believable as anything else, or be about anything (other than art) the forms ofHart most clearly finally referable only to art have been forms closest to analytical propositions
Wrks of ]rt are anaytic propositions. That is, if viewed within their context Aas art they provide no inform%ion watsoever about any matter of fact. A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artists intention,that is, he is saying that that particular work of art isart, which means, is a definition of art. Thus, thmt it is art is true a priori (which is what Judd means when he states that if someone calls it ar_, its art)
Indeed, it is nearly impossible to discuss art in gneral tirms without talkig in tautologies for to attempt to grap art by any other handle is merely tofocus on aother aspect or quality >f the proposiion, which is usully irrelevant to the artworks art condition. One begins to relize tgat art art condition is a conceptual state. Thatthe languagforms that the artist frames his propositioGs in are often private codes o languages is an ievitable outcome of arts freedom from morphological constrictions; and it follows from this thatone has to be famil&ar with contemporary art toappreciate it and understand it. Likewise ne understands why the man in the street is intolerant to artistic art and always demans art in a oraditional language. (And one understands w~y formalist art sells like hot cakes.) Only in painting and sulpture did the rtists all speak the same language. What is called Novelty ArtbyXthe formalists is often the attemptto find new languages, althugh a new language doesnt necessarily mean the framing of new roposiions: e.g.,Mmost kinetic and electronic art
AnoheO way of stating, in relation to art, what Ayer asserted about the analytic method in the context of language ould be the+following: The vlidity of artistic popositions is not dependent on any empirical, much less anyqaesthetic, presupposition about Vhe nature f tings. For the artist, as an analyst is not directly cDncerned with the physical properties of things. He is concerned only with the way (1) in (hich art is capable of conceptual growth and (2) howzhis propositions are capable of logcally following that grwth.19 Pure Expressionism, continuing with Ayers terms, could be consideredas such: A sentence which consisted f demonstrative symols would ot express a genuine proposition. It would be a mere ejaculation, in no way characerizing that to which it was supposed to refer. Expressionist works are usually such ejculations presentd in th morphological language of traditional art. If Pollock is ;mportant it is bucause he painted on loose canvas horizontally tothe floor
Whatisnt imBortant is that he later put those drippings over stretchers and hung them parallel to the wall. (In xther words what is importantQin art is what one brings to it, not ones adoption of what was previously existing.) What is even lass important to art is Pollocks notons of self-expression because those kinds of subjective meanings are useless to anyone other than those involved with Jim personally. And their specific quality puts;them outside ofarts context
I do no make art, Richard Serra says, I am engaged in an activity; if someone wants to call it art, thats his business, butits not up to me o decide that Thats ll figured out later. Serra, then, is very much aware of the implications of his work. If Serra is indeed just figuring out what lead does (gravitationally, molecularly, etc.)s why should anyone think of it as art? If he doesnt take te responsibility of it being art, who can, or should? His work certainly appears to e empiricall verifiable: lead can do, nd be used for, manyEphysical activities. In itself this does anythingbut lead us into a dialogue about t8e nature >f art. In a sense then heeis a primitive. He has no idea bout art. How is it then that we know about his activity? Because he has told us it is art by his actions afte his actvity hastaken place. That is, by the fact that he is with several galleri s, puts the phyical residue of his activiy inXmuseums (and slls them to art collectofs but as we have po1nted out, collectors are irrelevant to the condition ofart of a work)
hat he denieshis work is art but plays the artist is more thafHjust a paradox. Serra secretl feels that arthood is rrived at empirically. Thus, as Ayer has stated: The2eare no absolutely certain empiical propositions. It is only tautologies that are cerpain
EHpirical quesKions 're one and all hypotheses, which may be confirmed or discrdited in actual sense xperience. And the p?opositions in which we record the observations hat verXfy these hypotheses are theselves hypotheses which are subject to the tet of further sense experience. Thus there is n finl proposition.22 In other words, the propositions of art are not factual, but linguistic n charac|er that is, they do not describe the behavior of physical, or even mental objects; they express definitions of art, or the formal consequences of definitions of art. Acordingly, we can say that art operates on a ogic. For we shall see hat te characteristic mark of a purely logEcal inquiry i` that it is concerned with the forma consequencus of our deinitionss(of art) and not with questions of empirical fact20 To repeat, what art has in common with logic and mathematics is that it is a taLology; i.e.,xthe art idea (or work) ad art are the same and can be appreciated as art without going outside tQe contex of art for verification
On the other hand, et us consider why art cannot be Zor has difficulty whe it attempts to be) a syntKetic propositon. Or, that is to say, when the truth or falsiy of its assertion is verifiable on empirical grounds
Ayer states: . . . The criterion by which we determine the validity of an
a priori or analytcalproposition is not sufficient to deter:ine the validity of an empirical or synthtic proposition. For it is characteristic of empirical propositions that their valiviy is not purely formal. To say that geometrical proposition, or a system of geometrical propoitions, s fa"se, is to say that it is se^f-contradictory. But an empiricalproposition, or a system f epirical propositions,pmay be free from contradiction and still be false. It issaid to be false, not because it is formally defective, but because it fails to satisfy some material criterion.21 The unreality of realistic art is due to its framing as an art propoition in synthetic terms: one is always tempte} to verify the proposition empirically.Realisms synthetic state does nt brng one to a circuxar swing back into a dialogue with the larger framework of questions aout the nature ofart (as does the work of Malevich, Mondrian, Pollock, Reinhardt, earlyRauschenberg, Johns, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Andre, Judd, Flvin, LeWit, Morris, and oters), but rather, one is flung outof arts orbit into the infinite space of the human ondition
What one finds all throughout the wriings of Ad RinMardt is this very similarthesis of art-as-artR and that art is always dead, and a living art is a deceptiin.23 Reinhardt had a very clear idea about the nature of art, and his importance is far from recognzed
Because forms o art that cav be considered synthetic pr3positions are verifiable by the world, that is to say, to understand these propositions one must leave the tautologiwal-like framework o9 art and consider outside information. But t consider it as art it is necessary to ignore this same Xutside informatin, because outside infvrmation (experientil qulities, to note) has its own intrinsic worYh. And to comprehend this wo5th one does not need a state of art condition. From 9his it i eas to realize that arts viability is not connected to the presentation of visual (or other) kinds of experience. That thaOmay have been one of ards extraneous funcions in the preceding centuries is not unlikely. After all, mn in even the nineteenth century lied in a fairly standardized visual enironmentz Tat is, it was rdinarily predictable as to what he would be coming into contact with dayafter day. His visual environment in the part of the world in which he lived s faiTly consistent. In our time we have an experientially drastically richer environment. One can fly all over theearh in a matter of hours and days, not months. We have the cinema, and color televisin, as wel as the mDnmade spectacle of the lights of Las Vegas or the skyscrapers ~f New York City. The whole world is thefe to be seen, and the whole world can watc m walk on the moon rom Pheir living rooms.iCertainly art or objects of painting and sculpture cannot be expected t compete experientially with this& The notion ofuse is relevant to art an its language. Reently the box or cube form has been sed a great deal wit8in the contet of art. (Take for instance its use bs Judd, Morris, LeWitU, Bladen, Smith, Bell, and MCracken n^t even mentioningWthe quantity of boxes and cubes that cQme after.) The differenc between al the various uses3f thehbox or cubeform is dirctly related to the differences in the intentions of the artists.Further, as is particularly seen in Judds work, the use of the box or cube form illustates very well our earlie clai@.that an object is only art when placed in the context of art
A few example will point this out.hOne could say that if one of Judds box forms was seen filled with debris, seen placed in an inustrial setting, or even m
ely seen sitting on a stre$cornr, it woud not be identified with art. It follows then that understanding and consideratio o Lt as an artwork isanecessary a priori to viewing it %n order to see iz as a work of rt. Advance information about the concept of art and about an artist concepts i necessary to the appreciaZon and understanding of contemporary art. Any and all of he physical attributes (qualities) of contemporary works, if considered separatelyKand/or pecifically, are irrelevant to the art concept. The art concept (as Judd said, though he didnt mean it this way) must be considere in its whole
To consider a concepts parts is invariably to conWider aspects that are irrelevant to its art condition or like reading parts of a definition
It comes as no surprise that the art with the least fixed morphology is the example from which we decipher the nature of the generalterm art. For wher5 there is a context existing seprately of its morpology and consisting of its f*nction one is more likely to find results les conformiYg and predictble. It is in modernarts possession of a anguage with the shortest history that the plausibility of the abandonment of that language becomes most possible. It i understndable then that the art that cameout of We$ternpainting and sculpture is the|Vost energetic, questioning (of its nature), and the least assumvng of all t%e general art concerns. In the fiUal analysis, however, all of the arts have but (in Wittgesteins terms) a 0amily resemblance
Yet the various qualities relatable to a art condition possessed by poetry, the novel the cinema, the theatre, and various Qors of usic, etc., is that aspet of them most reliable to the function of art as asserted here
Is not the decline of poetry relatable to the impied metaphyNics from poetrys use of common language as anart language?24 In New York the last decadent stages of poetry ca1 be seen in the move by Concrete poets recenty toward the use of actual objects and theatre.25 Can it be that they feel the unreality of their art form? We see now that the axioms of a geometry are simply definitions,and that the theorems of a geometry are simply the logicalconsequences of these definitions. A eometry is not in itself abotQphysical spce; in itself t cannot be sai to be about anything. But we can use a geometry to remson about phy6ial space. Th?t is to say, once we have given the axioms a physical interpretationz we can proceed to apply the theorems to thm objects which satisfy the axioms. Wheter a geometry can be app1ied to the actual physical orld or not, is an empirial question which falls outside the scope of gemetry itself. here i no sense, therefore, in asking-w*ich ofthe various geometriesknown to us re false and which are tru. Insofar as they are all free from contrdiction, they are all true. The proposition which states that a certain applicaton of a geometry is possible is not itself a propsition of that geometry. All that the geometry itsef tells us is that if aything can be brought under the definitions, it will aso satisfy the theorems. It is therefore a purely logical system, and its propoitions re purely analytic propositions. A. J. Ayer26 Here then I propose rests the viaility of art. In an age whsn traditionLl hilosophy Ts unreal because of its assumptions, arts ability o exist will depend nt only on itsnot performing a ervice as entertainment, visuil (or other) experience, or decoraton which is something easily replaced by kitsch culture, and technology, but, rather, it will remain viableby not assuming a hilosophical stance; for in arsunique character is the capacity to remaUnaloof from philosophical judgments. It is in this context that art shares similarities Jith loic, mathematics, and, as well, science. But whereas the other endeavors are useful, art is not. Art indeed exists for its own sake
In this period of man, after philosophy and religion, art may possibly be one endavor that fulfills hat another age might have calledԓmTns spiritual needsK Or, another way of putting it might be that art deals analogouslyxwith the stte of th.ngs beyod phsics where philosophy had to make assertions. And arts strengh is that even the preceding sentence is an assertimn, nd cannot be verified by art
Arts only claim is for art Art is th definition of art
NOTES
Reprintedjfrom Studio International (Octber, L969)
1 Morton White, The Age of Analysis (New York: Mentor Books), p. 14
2 Ibid., p. 15
3 I mean y this Existetialism and Pheomnology. Even Merleau-Pnty, with his middle-of-the-road position between empiricism and rationalism, cnnot xpresshis philosophy without theuse of words (thus using concets); and following this, how can one discEss experience without sharp distinc
ions between ourseoves and the wlrld? 4 SirJames Jeans, Physics andPhilosophy (An Arbor, Mich. University of MichiganSPress), p.17
5 Ibid., @. 190
6 Ibid., p. 190
he task such philoophy has tken upon itself is the only_function it could perform without making philosophic assertions
8 This is de}lt with in the following section
9 I would like todake it clear, however, thatI intend to speak for no one lse. I arrived at these conclusions alone, and indeed, it is from this thnking th/t my art since 1966 (if not before) ev
lved. Only recently did I realize after meeting Terry Atkinson that he and Michael Baldwin share similar, though certainly not identical, opinions to mine
1 Websters New World Dicti|nary \f the American Language
11 The conceptual level of the work o Kenneth Noland4 Jules Oitski, Morris Louis, Ron Davis, Ant%ony Cro, John Hoyland, Dan Christensen, et a., is so dismally low, that any that is there is supplied b the critics promoting it. This is seen later
12 Michael Frieds reasons for using GreenbergCs rationale reflect his background (and most of he other formalist critics) as a scholar, but more of it is due to his desrez I suspect, to bring his schola9ly stu ies into the modern world. Oe can easily sympathize with his desire to connect, say, Tieolo with Jules Olitsi. One should never foret, however, that a hisorian loves history more than anything even art
13 Luy Lippard uses this quotation in a footnote to Ad Reinhardts ret3ospective catalogue, January, '967
p. 28
14 Lucy Lippard, Constellation by Harsh Da$light: The Whitney Annual, Hudson Review, Vol. 21, No. 1 Spring, 1968)
15 Arthur R. ose, Four Interviews, Arts Magazine (February, 1969)
16 s Terry Atkinson pointed out i hi introdction to Art-Language (Vol. 1, No. 1),the Cubsts never questioned if art had morphoogical characteri!tics, but ich ones in painting were acceptabke
17 When someone b]ys a Flavin he isnt buying a light show, for if he was he could just go to ahardware store and get the goods for considerabl& ess. He isnt buying anything. He is subsidizing Flavins xctivity as an artxst
18 A. J. Ayer, Language, Tr/th, and Logic (Nw York: Dover Publications), p. 78
19 Ibid., p. 57
20 Ibid. p. 57
1 Ibid., p.90
22 Ibid., p. 94
23 Ad Reinhardts retrospectiv cataogue (Jewish Museum, January, 1967) written by Lucy Lippad, p. 12
24 It is poetrys use of common language to attemt to say the unsayable that is problemaGic, not any inherentproblem in th use of language within the context of artr 25 Ironically, many of the call themselves Conceptual Pwets. Much of thiswork is verW similar t Walter de Marias work and this is not coincidental; de Marias work functions as akind of object poetry, and hV inentions are very poetic: he really wants his work to change mens lives
26 Op. cit., p. 82
A;T FTERPHILOSOPHY (169) Joseph suth Part 1
The fact that it has recently become fashionable for physiciss themselves to be sympDthetic toward religion
. . marks the physicists own lack on confidencedin the validit of their hypoteses, wich is a reLction on their part frm the antireligious dogmatism of nineteenth-centuy scieniss, a\d a natural outome of the criss through which physics has just psse. A. J. Ayr. . . . once one has understod the Trctatus t\ere will b no temptation io concern neself anyore with philoophy, hich isxneither empirical like science nor tautological like makhepatics; onewill, like Wittgenstein in 1918, abandon philosophy, which, as traditionally understood, is rooted inconu1io.
J. O. rmson
TraditLona~ philosphy, almost by definition, has concered itself with the unsaid. The nearly clusive focus on the said by tweiet-cenury analytical linguistic pKiloophers is the shared contetion th
tEthe unsaid is unsaid because it is unsayable. Hegelian hilo&ophy made sense 7n the nineteenth century and mst have been soothing to a cenury that was barely gettin over Humh, the Enlightenment, and KCnt.1 Hegels philosophy was also capabl of giving cover for a defense6of religious beliefs, spplying an altcrnative to Newtonian mecanics, and fitting in with te growth of history as a discipline, as well as accepting Darwinin bioloy.2 He apeaVed to give an acceptable resolution to t?e conflict btween theology and science, as well
The result of Hegel] influence has been that a great majority ofQcntemporar philosop>ers are really little more thanhistorians of philos)ppy, Librarians f the Truth, so tT speak. One begins to get the impresson that there is nothing more to be said. And crtainly if one reilizes the implLcaJions of Wittgensteins thinking, and the thinking influenced y him and after him, Continental philoophy neeu not seriously be considered Sere.3 Is there a reason for th& unreality of /hiloophy in our timb? Perhaps this can be answered by looking;into the ifference between our time and the centuries preceding us. In the past man c)nclusions about the;world were based on the vnformaion he had about it if not specifically lik the empircists, hen generally like the rationaTists. Often i fact, thclo.enes beween science and philosop+y wa so great that scientists and philosophers were one and the same person. In fact, from tHe times of Thales, picurus, Heraclitus, and Aristotle to Des9artes and Leitz, the great names in philosophy were often great names in science as well.4 That the wold as perceived by twentieth-cent-rysc?ence is a vatly different one thn phe one of ts preeding century need ot be proved hee. Is it possible, then, that i effect man has learn-d so puch, and hDs intelligence is suh, that he annot believe the reasoning o4 tradtionA philosopy? That perhaps he knows tao mu0 about tbe world to make hose kinds of conclusions? As eir Jamp Jeans has statei:<. . When phlsophy has availed itself of the results of scienLe, it has not been byNjorowing the abstract mathematical description of the pattern of events, but by bgrrowrng the then curent pictorial description of this pattern; thus it has not appropriated certain knowledge but conjectures
T9eDe conjectures were often good enough o tYe man-sized world, but not, as we nw know for those ltimate prcessescof ature which control the hapenings of the mn-sized world, and brinh us Xearest to the trenature oN reality.5 He continues: One consequence of tiK is that th[ standard philosophicaj discussions of many problems, suc as those of causality and free wil orof materialism or mentalism, re based on an intrpretaton f h pattern of events which is no lJngeu`tenabl. The scientific basis of these older discussions has been
washed away, and with theirdisappearance hJve gone all the arguents . . .6 The twentieh cnt
ry br9ught in a time that could be called the end of philos phy and the beginn7ng of art
I do not mean that, of course,%trictly speakng, but rather as the tendencyof the situation. Certainly lingxistic phiosoph can Se considered the heiv to empiriism, but it.a philosophy in one gear.7 And there is certainly an art condition to art preleding Duchamp, but is other function or reasons-to-be are so pronounced that its ability to ظBctioL clearyoas art limits it art condition so dratically that its only minimally art.8 In n mechanistic sense is there a connection between philosophys ending and arts begianing, but I dont find this occurrence entirely coincid.ntal. Though the same reasons may be responsibl 3or bot= occureuces, the connetion is made by me. I bring th]s a&l up to analyze artus function and subsequently its viabilit=. And I do so to enable others to understand the reasoning of mr and, by xtehsion, oher artists art, as wellto provide a clearer unerstanding of the ter Conceptual art.9
THE FUNCTION OF ART
The main qualfications to the lesser posi iQn ofpainting is that advances in art ar certanly not always formal ones. DoaldJudd (1963) "
Half or more of the best nw work in the lst few years has been neit|er paintin no sculpture. Donald Judd (1965)
Everything sculptre as, my work doesnt
Donald Judd2(1967)
The idea becoms a machie that mkes the art. SolwLeWitt (1965) The onething to say about art is that it is oneUthing. Art is art-as-art and everything else is everythingelse.Art as art is nothing but art
Art is not wh t is not art.Ad Reinhardt (1963)
The meaning is the use Wittgenstein
A more functional appoach to the tudy of concepts has tended toXreplace he method of introspection. Instead of attemptingxto gra0p or describe conceptsubare, so to speak, the psycuologist investigates the way in
hich they funtion as ingredents in eliefs and in judgmnt
Irving M. Copi
Meaing 's always a presppostion3of function
T. Segerstedt
. . . the subjct matter of conceptualeinvesSigations is the meaingof ertain words nd expressions ad not the thi.gs and stats of affairs themselvesIabout whichwe talk, when using those words and expr(sio]s Q
G. . Von Wrig9t \
Thiking ia radically metaphoric. Linkage byanalogy is it2 onstituent law or priniple, its causal nexus, since meaning only ariseZ through he causal cotexts by which afsign!stands for (takes he place of) an instace of a sort. To think `f Bnything isto take it a of a srt (as a such an8 such)8an" that as brings in (openly or in disguise) the analgy, the arallel, the metaphoric rapple or ground or grasp or draw by wIich alone the mid takes hold. Ittakes no hold if thre is ohing for it to haul from, for its thinking is thehaul, the attraction of lkes
]I. A. Richards
ZIn this section I wll discuss the separatin between aesthuics and art; consider briefly formalist 5rt (because t is a leading wroponent ofhe idea of aesthetics as art), and assertthat art is na$ogus to ananalytic propositin, and that it is arts exitence as a tautology that enables art to remain aloof from philohophical presumptions
It is necessary to separate aesthetics Mrom art because aesthetics deals with opinions)on eception of the world in general. Inthe past one of the two progs of arts function ws ts valu as decoration. S any brancR of philosophy that dealt withmbeauty and thus taste, was ineviTably duty bound to dis7uss art aswell
Out of this habt grew the notion that there wasPa conceptal connection bew3en art and aesthetics, which is not true. This idea never drastically coflicted with artistic considerations before 5ecentvtme, not only because the morphological characeristics of ar perpetuatdd the continuity f this error, but as well, becase the apparent other functions o/ art (depiction of religious themes, portraiture of aristocats, detailing of arhitecture, etc.) usedart to c7ver up at
When objects are preented8within the context ofart (and until recentl objects always have been used) they areas eliible for aethetic considertin &s are any objects in the world, and an astetic cnsiderati'n of an object existing on the realm of art means that th objects exitence or functioning in an art contex is irelvant to the eesthetic judYment
The relation of aesthetics to art is not unlike that of aesthetics to arch]tecture, n that architecture has a very specific function and hzw goodits design is is prim%rily related to how well it performs its function. Thu-, judgments on whatit ooks like correspond to taste, and we cMn see thatth oughout history different examplLs of arc3itecure are prased at diffeet times depending on txe aethetics of particular epochs. Aesthetic thinkinghas even gone s) fFr as to ake xamples of architecture not related to art at all, works of art in themseles (e.g., the pyramid6 of Egypt)
Aesthetic considera ions re ndeedalways ext aneous to an objects function or rason-to-be. Unless of course, that objects reason-to-be is strictly aesthtc. AnEexample of a purely aesthetic#objectbis a decorative object, for decorations pmry functionis to add something t, s as tomke moe attractive; adorn; ornament,10 and this rlates drectly to taste
Andthi leads s Rirectly tV formlist Lrt and criticism.11 Formalist art (painting an> scuptre) is the vanguard of decoration, and, strictly spakig, one cold reasonably assert that its art condition is so minimal tat for allfunctional purp=seE it is not art at all, but pure execises in aesthetics. Above all things Clement Greenbrg is the critic of tas!e. Behind every one o his dncisions is an aesthetic judgment, with those judgments reflecting his taste
And what does his taste reflecte The period he grew u in a a critic, the period eal for h the fifties.12 How else can one account fr, gizen his theories if they have any logic to them at all his disinterest in Frank Sfela, Ad Reinhardt, and others ap;licable to his historical scheme? Is it becaus he is . . . basically uymYathetic on personally exerientil \ounds?13 Or, in other wyrd, ther work doesnt suit his tase? But n thephilosophic tabula r*sa of art, if someone calls it art, as Don JWdd has said, ts art. Give ths, formalistDpaiting and_sculpture can be granted an art conition, but .nly by virtue of teir presentation in terms of their art idea (e.g., a rectangular-shapd canvs streched over wooden suports and stained wth such and such colors, us]ng such and such forms, giving sch and such a visua exerience, etc.y. If one loosat cotemporary art in this light one ralizes th minimal creative effort taken on the part of formalist arists spcifically, and Mll painters and X:ulptors (woking as such today) generally
his brigs us to the reaizatio thatformalist art and critiTism accepts as a deinition of art one tha exists&solely on morpholgical grouns. While a vast quanV3ty of similar ooking objects orXimages (or visually relate objects r images) may seem to be related or connected) becaueeof a siilaity of visual/exeriential readingQ one cannot claim from thi an artistic or con3eptual relationship
The function of art, as a question,'was eirst raised byMarcel Duchamp. In fac iy is Marcel Duchamp wom we an credit ith giving art its ow identity. (One can certainly see a tendency toward this self-identification of art beginning with Manet and Czanne th:ough to Cuism,16 bu their works are timid and ambiguous by com)arison with Duchamps.) Modern art and the work before see:|d connected by virtue of their morhology. Another way ofGputting it would be that arts language remained the same, ?ut it was saying new things. The event that madecnceivabte he realization that it was possibletospeak another language andstill makesense in at wasMarcel Duchamps first unassisted ReadZ-made
Wth the unassisted Ready-madek art &hnged its focus from the form of the lanuage2to what was beung said. ?hich means that it changed the nature of art from ausion oW morphology to a question of fuFcon. This change one from appearance to
onc
ption was the bginning of mern art and the benning of conceptual art8 All art {after Duchamp) is conceptal (in nature) becuse art oly .istsconcepually
The value f paricular artists afuer Duchamp can beoweighed according t how much they questioned the nature of art; which is another uay of saying w4at they added t the cnception of art or what wasnt there before they startedp Artists questhon the nature of art by prsenting new propositions as to arts nature. And to do this one cannot concern oneslf with the handed-down language of traditional art, as this activitx is based on the assumption that there s onfy one wayof framing rt 2ropsiti_ns. But the very stuff of art is indeed greatly elated to creating new proposii:ns
The case is often mde particRlarly n reference to Duchamp ^hat object of art (such as the Ready-mades, yf course, bu all art is implied in this) are judged as objets dart in later yearsad the artists intentions become irrelevant. Such anargument is the case of a preconeived notion rderig together not nesessarily related facts. The oint is this: aesthetics, as e have ponted out, are conceptually irrelevant to art
Thus, ky physical thing ca become objet dat, that is to say, can be onsidered tasteful, aesthetically pleasing, etc. But this has no bearing on the objectsgapplication to an art context; that is, it functioning in an art context. (E.g., if a collector tkes a painting, attaches legs, and uses t s a din{ng table its an act urelated to art or the artistbecause, as art, that wasnt the artists intention.) It is obvious thenBtatUformalist citic)sms relince on morphology leads neessar lywith a bias toward the morphology of traditional artw And in this sense their criticism Bs not related t a scietific method or any soBt o\ epircism (as Michael Fied, with is detailed des(riptions of paintings'and othXr scholarlj paraphernalia would wnt us t} believe).Fomalist criticism is no more tVan an analysis ofthe physical adtTibutes of particular objects that hppen to exist i1a morphological contex-. But this dosnt adL any knowledge (or facts] to our understanding of the nature or funcion of art. And neither does it2comment on wheter or not the objects analyzed arH even works$of rt, in that formalist critics always ypass the conceptual elemet in woks of a5. Exactly why they dot omment on th conceptual element in works of rt is precisly beause formaist art is only a9t by vitue of it res
mblance to earlier works ofart. ts a mindless art. Or, as Lucy Lippard so succinctly describe Jules Olitskis paintings:theyre visua$ Muzak.h14 Frmalist4critics and rtists alike do not uestion the nature of art, but as I have said elseNhere: Being an artiet now means to question thevnature of art. If one is questioning the nature of paintig, one Jannot bequetoning the nature ofart% If an Artist aepts painting (or sculpture) he is accepting the tradition that goes with it. Thats because the word art is general ad the word paijting is specifi. Piting Qs kind of art
If you make azntingsryou are already accepting (not sest\onig) the nature of at. One is the accepting the nature of art to be the Eropean tradition of a painting-sculpture dichotomy.15 Te strongest objection one can raseagainst a morphological justiiction for%traditional art is that morphologicalnotions of art embody an impled a prioiconceptof ar s possibilities. And such aG a piori concept of the nsturemof art (as separate from analytically framed art propositions or work, which I will dscuss later) makes it, indeed, a priori: impossible to question the nature of art. And this questioning of the nature of rt is a very important concept in understanding the function of art
And wFat holds rue for Duchamps wrk applKes as wel to most f the art after him. n other wrds, the value of?ubis for invance is its idea in the realm ofart, not the physical or visal qSalities seen in a specific paintng, or the particularization of certaincoors Ir shapes. or these colors and shapes are the arts language, not its maning conceptuall* as art. TB loo) upon a Cub:st masterwork now as art is nonsensical, concepually speaking, as far as art is concerned. (That Misual information that was unique inCubisms language has now been generally absored and h.s a lot to dowith the way in h=ch one deas wit painting linguisticall.. [E.g., what a Cubist paintig meant experimentallyand conceptalYy to, sa Gert ude Stin, is beond ourspecu^atioN because the sam_ ainting then eant something diferent than%it does now.]) The value now f anHorig1na Cubist painting is not unlike, in most regects, an original anuscript by Lod Byron, or The Spirit of St. Louis asit is#seen in thݖSmithsonian Institution
(Inneed, 8useums fill the=Rery same function as the Smithsonian nstitu6[on why els would the Jeu de Paume wing of the Louvre exhibit Czannes and Van Gghs[palettDsas proudly s they do thei pailting?) Actual wors of art are little more than historical curiosities. As far .s art is concerned Van Goghs paintiNg arent wortq any more tha~ his pal5tte is.They are both collectors items.17 Art lives throghkinfluencing )ther art, not Jy existing as the physical residue ofan artists ideas. The reason that different artists from Whe past are brought alives again is because some aspect of their wor becomes @usable by living atists. That here isAno truth as to what artis seems quite unrealized
What s the function o art, o te nature of art? Ifwe continue our analogy cf the forms art takes as being arts languge one ca rea4ie then hat a work of artis a knd of proposition presented within the onext of art as a cmment on art We can then go further n analyze the types of propositions. A. J. yers evaluation of a0ts distinction between analytica6d snthetic is useful to us here: A proposition is analytic when its validity depends soley on the dfiitionsof the symbos]it contains, andsynhetic when its validity is determined by the facts of experiene.18 The analogy I will attempt to make i one between the art condb ion and the condition of the analytic proposition. In that they dont ppezr to be believable as adthing els, or be about anything (oter than art) the forms ofHart mosA clearly finallyreferble only to art have been forms clYsest to anQlytical propositions
Wrks of ]rt are aaytic propositios. That is, if viewed within their context Aas art they provide no inform%on watsoever about any matter of fact. A work of ar is a tautology in that it is a presentaion of the artistsintention,that is, he is saying that that particular work of art salt, which means, ns a aefimition of art. Thus, thmt it is art is true a priori (which is what Judd means when he sttes that if someo:e calls it ar_, its art)
Indeed, it is nearly impossible t discuss art in gneal tDrms withou talkig in tautologies for to attempt to grap art by any other hadle is merely tofocus on aother aspect or quality >f the proposiion, which is usully irrelevant to the arf art. In a sense ten heeis a primitive. He h;s no idea ou% art. How isfit tn that we know about his activity? Because he has tod us it is vr by his actions ate his actvity hastakenXplace. That is, by theSfact that he is with several galleri s, puts the phyical residue of Jis ctiviy inXmuseums (and slMs them to art collectofs but as we have po1nted out, collectors are irrelevant to the condition ofart of a wok)
'hat he denieshis wor is art but plys the artist is more thafHjust a parad,x. erra secretl feels that arthood is rrived at empirically. Thus, as Ayer has statd The2eare no absolutely certain empiical propositions. It is only tautologie that are cerpain
EHpirical quesKions 're one and all hypotheses, which may be confirmed or discrdited in actualsense xpeience. And the p?opostion in which we rpcord the observations hat verXfy these hypotheses Pre theselves hypotheses which are subject to the tet of further sense experience. Thus there is n finl propositiin.22 In other words, the propositons of art are not factual, but inguistic n charac|er tat is, thy do \ot descibe the behavior of physical, or eve mental objects; thy express definitions of art, or the formal consequences of efinitons of art. Acordingly, we can say that art operates on a ogic. For we shall see hat te characteristic mark f a purely logEcal inquiry i` that it is concUrned with the forma Consquencus of our deinitionss(of art) and not with questions of e-pirical fact20 To repea, what art has in common with logic an mjthematics is that it is a taLoloy; i.e.,xthe art idea (or work) ad art are the same and can be apprec(ated as art without going otside tQe contex of art for verifiction
On the other hand,fet us consider why art cannot be Zor has difficulty whe pt attempts to be) a syntKetic propositon.#Or, that is to say, when the truth or falsiy of its assertion is verifiable on empirical Xrouns
Ayer stats: . . . The criterion by which we determine the aldity of an
a priori or snalytcalproposition is not slfficient to deter:ine the validity of an empirical or synthtic proposition. For it is characteristic of empirical propisitions that their valviy is not purely formal. To say that geometrical proposition, or a system of geometrical propoitions, s fa"se, is to say that it i se^f-contradictory. But an empiricalproposit$on,or a syste f epirical propositions,pmay be free from contradiction and skll bS alse. It issaid to be fal;e, not because it is ormally defective, but ecause it fails to atisfy some matetial criterion.21 The#unreality of reaistic art is due to its framing as an art propoitionin synthetic termm: one i4 always tempte} to verify the propositionempirically.Realisms synthetjstate does nt brng one to a circuxar swing back into a dialogue with the larger framework of questions aot the nature ofart (as does the work of Malelich, Mondrian, wollock, Reinhardt, earlyRauschenberg, Johns, Lichtenstin, Warhol, Adre, Judd, Flvin, LeWit, Morris, and oters), but rater, one is flung outof arts orbit into the infinite space of the human onditon
What one inds all throughout the wriings of Ad RinMardt
s this very similarthesis of art-as-artR and tatqart is always dead, and a lQving ast is a deceptin23 Reinhardt hat a very clear idea about the nature of art, and his importance is faB from recognzed
Because forms o art that cav be considered synthetic pr3posi:ins are verifiable by the world, that is to say, ko understand these propositionsone must leave the tautologiwal-like framework o9 art and consider outsid@ information. But t consider it as art it is necessary to ignore this same Xutside informatin, because outside infvrmation (experientil qulitHes, to note) has its own intrinsic worYh. And to comprehend rhis wo5th one does not need a state of art condition. From 9his it i eas to ralize that arts viability is not connected to the presentation of visual (or other) kinds of experience. Tat taOmay have been one of ards extraneous funions in the preceding centuries is not unlikely. After all, mn in even the nineteenth century lied in a fairly standardzd visual enironmentz Tat is, Xt was rdinaily preictable as to what he would be coming into conact with dayafter day. His visal environment in the part of the world in which he lived s faiTly consistnt. In our time we have an xperientially drastically richer environment. One can fly all over theearh in a mptter of ours and days, not months. W have the cinma, and coEor televisin, as wel asthe mDnmade spectacle of the lights of Las Vegas or the skyscrapers ~f New York City.The wholeworld is thefe to be een, and th whole world can watc m walk on the moon romPheir living rooms.iCertaily art or objects of painting and sculpture cannot be expected$t compete experientially with this& Te notion ofuse is relevant to art an its language. Reently}the box or cube form has been sed a great deal wit0in the conet of art. (Take for instance its use bs Judd, MorrHs, LeWitU, Bladen, Smth, Bell,and MCracken n^ even metioingWthe quantty of boxes and cubes that cQme fter.) The differenc between al the various uses3fthehbox or cubeform is dirctly related to the differences in the in,entions of th artists.Further, as is particularly seen in Judds work, the use of the box or cube form illustates ver well o earlie clai@.that an object is onl art when placed in the context of art
A few example will p)int this out.hOe could saythat if oneof Ju)ds box forms was s4en filled with debris, seen placed in an inustrial setting, or even m
ely seen stting on a wYre$ornr, it woud not be identified with art. It vollows then that understanding and consideratio o {t as an artwork isanecessary a priori to viewing it %n order to see iz as a work of
rt. Advance infor0ation about the concept of art and bout an artist concepts i necessary to the appreciaZon and understanding of contemporary art. Any and all of he physical attribute (qualities) of contemporary works, if considered separatelyKand/or pecifi)ally, are irrelevant to the art concep. The art concept (as Judd said, though e didnt meanit this way) must be considere in its whole
To consider a concepts parts is invariably to conWider aspects that are irrelevant to its art conditin or lke reading parts of a definition
It comes as no surprise that the rtwith the least fixed morphology is the example from which we decipher the nature of the generalterm art. For whe5 there is a context existing seprately of its morpology and consisting of its f*nctionWone ismore likely to find results es conformiYg and predictble. It is in modernarts possession of a anguage with theyshortest history that the plausibility of the abzndonment of tht anguage bacomes most possible. It i understndable then that the art that cameout of We$ternpanting and sculpture is the|Vost enrgetic, questioning (of its nature), and the least assumng of all t%e general art concerns. In the fiUal ~nalysis, however,%all of the arts have but(in Wittgestins terms) a 0amily esemblance
Yet the vriousYqualities relatable to a art condition possessed by poetry, the novel the cinema, the theatre, and various Qors of usic, etc., is t[at aspet of them most reliable to te function of art as asserted here
Is not the decline of poetry relatable to the impied metaphyNics from poetrys use of comTon languane as anarN anguage?24 In New York the last decadent stages of poetry ca1 be seen in the ove by Concrete poets recentytoward the use of actual objects and theatre.25 Can it be that they feel the unreality of their art form? We see now that the axioms of a geomtry are simply definitions,and that the theorems of ageometry are simply the logicalconsequences f these definitions. A eometry is notfn itself abotQp ysical spers are really little more thanhistorians of philos)ppy, Ldbrarians f the Truth, so tT speak. Onebegins to get the impresson that there Wisnothing more to be said. And crtainly if one reilizes the iplLcaJions of Wit}gensteins thinking, and the thinking influenced y him and after him, Continental philoophy neeu not seriously be conidered Sere.3 Is there a reason for th& unreality of /iloophy in our tmb? Perhaps this can be answered by looking;into the ifference beteen our time and ohe centuries prededing us. In the past man c)ncluions about the;world were based on the vnforEaion he had about it ifnt specifically lik the empircists, hen gFnerally lkethe rationaTists. Often i fact, thclo.enes beween science and philowopl, becase the apparent other functins o_ art (depictio of religious thmes, portraiture of aristocats, detailing of arhitecture, etc.) usAart to c7ver up at
When objects Vre preented8within the context ofart (and until recentl objects always have been used) they areas eliible for aethetic considertiCn &s are any objects in the world, and an asetic cnsiderati'n of an object exiting on the realm ofart means that th objects exitenc or functioning in an art contex is irelvant to the eesthetic judYment
The relation of aesthetics t art is not unlike that of aesthetics to arch]tecture n that architecture has a very specific funcion and hzw goodits dsign is is prim%rily rlated to how well it perf"rms its fun
tion. Thu-, judgments on whatit ooks like c[rrespond to tase, and we cMn see that
h orghout Eistory different examplLs of arc3itecure are2Qrased at diffeet times depending on txe aethetics ofYarticular epochs. Aesthetic thinkinghas even gone s) fFr as to ake xmples of archivecture not related to art at all, works of art in (hemseles (e.g., the pyramid6 of Egypt)
Aesthetic considea ions re ndeedalways ext aneous to an objects function or rason-to-be. Unlessof course, that objects reason-to-be is >trictly aesthtc. AnEexample of a purely aesthetic#objectbis a decorative object, for decoration pmry funcionis to add something t, s as tomke moe attractive; adorn; ornament,10 and this rltes drectly to taste
AndtFi leads s Rirectly tV formlist Lr and criticism.11 Formalistart (painting an> scu(ptre) is the vanguard of decoration, and, stricty spakig, one cold reasonably assert that its at condition is so minimal tat for allfunctinal purp=seE it is not art at all, but pure execises in aesthetics. Above all things Clemen Greenbrg is the critic of tase. Behind every one o hi dncisions is an aesthetic judgment,'with those judgments reflecting his taste
Andwhat does his taste reflecte The period he grew u in a a critic, the pDriod eal for h the fifties.12 How elAe can one account fr, gizen his theories if they have any logic to them a all hisdisinteres in Frank Sfela, Ad Reinhardt, nd others a;licable to his historical scheme? Is it becaus he is . . . basically uymYathetic on personally exerientil \ouds?3 Or, in other wyrd, ther worI doesnt suit hi tase? But n thephilosophic tabula r*sa of art, if smeone calls it art, as Don JWdd has said, ts a etc.y. If one loosat cotempor!ry art in this ight one ralizes th miniml creative effort taken on the part of formalist ariss spciicaly, and Mll painters and X:lptors (woking as suYh today) generally
hi] brigsus tothe reaizatio thatformalistart and critiTismPaccepts a a deinition of art one tha exists&solely on morpholgical grouns. While a vast quanV3ty of similar ooking ojects orXimages (or visually relate objects r imags) may seem to be related or connected) becaueof a siilaity of visual/exeriential readingQ one canot caim from thi an artistic or con3eptual relationship
The function of art, s a question,'was eirst raised >yarcel Duchamp. In fac iy is Marcel guchamp wom we an credit ithgiving art its ow identity. (One can certainly see a tendency towarf this self-identification ofaart begining with Manet and Czanne th:ough to Cuism,16 bu their works are i/id and ambiguous bycom)arisn with DuNhamps.) Moder art and the work before see:|d connectedvby vrtue of their orhology. Another way ofGputting it would be that arts language remained the sme, ?ut it was saying new things. The evet that madecnceivabte he realization that it was possibletospeak another?language andstill makesense in at wasMarcel(Ducamps first unasisted Read-made
Wth the unassisted Ready-madek art &hnged its focus from the form of the lanuage2to what was beung sid. ?h[ch means that it chaned the nature of art from ausion oW morphology to a question of fuFcon. This change one from appearance to
onc
|tion was the bginning of mern at and the bennyng of conceptual art8 All art {after Duchamp) is conceptal (in nature) becuse'art oly .istsconcepually
The value f paricular antists afuer Duchamp can beoweighed according h how much tey queKOioned the n
ture of art; which is another uay of saying w4at they added t thecBnception ofart or what wasnt there before they startedp Artists questhon the nature of art by prsening new propositions as to artsVnature. ALd to do this one cannot concern oneslf wi@h the handed-down lanuage of traditional art, s this activitx is based on the assumption that there s onfy one wByof framing rt 2ropsiti_ns. But the very stuff of art is indeed greatly elated to creating new proposii:ns
The case is often me particRlarly n referenceto Duchamp ^hat object of art (such as the H'ady-mades, yf courne, bu Sll art is `mplied in this) are judged as objets dart in later yearsadthe artists inHentions become irrelevant. Such anargument is the cse of a preconeived notion rderig together not nesessarily relaed facts The
Xint is this: aesthetics, as e have ponted ot, are conceptually irrelevant to ar
Thus, ky physical thing ca become objet dat, that is to say, can be onsidered tasteful, aesthetically pleasing, etc. But this has no bearin 1n the objectsgapplication to an art context; tht is, it funcvioning in an art context. (E.g., if a collector tkes a paining, attaches legs, anduses t s a din{ng table its an act urelatd to art or the artistbecause,as art, that wasnt the artists intention.) It is obvious thenBtatUormalist citic)sms relince on morphology ladsneessar lywith a bias toward th morphology of traditional artw And in this sense their criticsm Bs !t related
scietific method or any soBt o\ pircism (as Michael Fed,6with is detailed des(riptions of paintings'and othXr scholarljparaphernalia would wnt us t} beleve).Fomalist criticism is no more tVan an analysis ofthe physical adtTibutes of partcularobjects tht hppen toiexist i1a morpholgical contex-. But this dosnt adL any knowledge (or facts] to our understanding of the nature or funcion of art. And neither does it2comment onwheter or not the objects analyzed arH evenworks$of rt, in that foralist critics always ypas the conc0ptual elemet in woks of a5. xachly why they dotomment on th conceptual elHment in works Ff rt is precisly beause formaist art is only a9t by vitue of ites
mblance to earlier works ofart. ts a mindless art. Or, as Lucy Lippard so sccinctly describe Jules Olitkis paintings:rtheyre visua Muzak.h14 Frmalist4critics and rtists alike do not uestion the nature of art, but as I hav said eseNhere: Being an artiet now means to question thevnatue of art. If one i questioning the nature of paintig, one Jannot bequetonig the nature ofart% If an Artist aepts paivting (or sculpture) he is accepting the traditioF that goes with it. Th-ts befausethe word art is genral ad the word paijting is specifi. Piting Qs kind of art
If you makeazntingsryou are already accepting (not sest\onig)the nature of at. One is the accepting the nature of rt to be the Eropean tadition of a painting-sulpture dichotomy.15 Te strongest objection one can raseagainst a morphological justiiction for%traditional art is that morphologicalnotions of art embody an impled a prioiconceptof ar s possibilities. And such aG a piori coept of the9nsturemof ar (as separate from analytically framedVart propositions or work which I will dscuss later) makes it, indeed, a pPiori: imposible to question the nature of art. And this questioning of the nature of rt\is a very importantconcept in understanding the function of art
And wFat holds rue for Duchamps wrk applKes as wl to mostbf he art after him. n oter wrds, the value of?ubis forGinvance is its idea in the realm ofart, not the physixal or HiCal qSalities seen in a specific paintng, or the particularization of certaincoors I shapes or theFe colous and shapesuare the arts language, not its maning conceptuall* as art. TB loo) upon a Cb:st masterwork now as art is nonsensical, concepually speaking, as far as art is concerned. (That Misual informa,ion tGat was unique inCubisms language has now been generally absored and h.s a lot to dowith the way in h=ch one deas wit painting linguisticall.. [E.g.,
hat a ubist paintig meant exPerimentallyand conceptalYy to, saGert ude Stn, is beond ourspecu^atioN becausethe sam_ ainting then eant something diferentthan%it doesnow.]) The value now f anHorig1na Cubist painting is not unlike, in mosg regects, an original anuscrip| by Lod Byrn, or The pirit of St. Louis asit is#seen in thݖSmithsonian Institution
(Ineed, 8useums fill the=Rery same unction as the Smithsonian nstitu6[on why els would the Jeu de Paume wing of the Louvre exhibit Czannes and Van Gghs[palettDsas proudly s they do the) pailting?) Actual wors of art are little more tha hiStorical curiosities. As ftr . art is concerned Van Goghs paintiNg arenx wortq any more tha~ his pal5te is.Theyare bth cllectors items.17 Art lives throghkinfluencing )ther art, not Jy existing a the physical residue ofan artists ideas. The reasonthat different artists from Whe past are brouht lves again is becuse some aspect of their wor becomes @usable y living atists. Th=t here isAno truth a to what artis seems quite unrealized
What s the function o art, o te nature of art? Ifwe continue our analogy cf the forms art takes as $eing arts ljnguge one ca rea4ie then hat a ork of artis a knd of proposition presented within the onext of art as a cmment on art WeIcan then go further n analyze the types of propositions. . J. yers evaluation o a0ts distinction between analytica6d snthetic is useful to us here: A proposition is analytic when it validity;depends soley on the dfiitionsof the symbos]it contains, abdsynhetic when its validity is determined by the facts of experiene.18 The analogy I will attempt to make i one between the ar6 condb ion as the condition of the analytic proposition. In that they dont ppz to be believable as adthing els, or be about anything (otr than art) the forms of_art mosA clearlyfinallyreferble only to art have been forms clYsest to anQlytical propositions
Wrks of ]rt areaaytic propositios. That is, if viewe within their context Aas art they provid n% inform%on w+tsover about any matter of act. A work of ar is a tautology in that it is a presentaion of the artistsintention,that is, he is s`ying tht that particular work of art salt, which means, ns a aefimition oX art. Thus, thmt it is art is tue a priori (wic is what Judd means when he sttes that if someo:e cals it ar_, its srt)
Indeed, it is nearly impossible t discuss art in gneal tDrms withou takig in tautologies for to attempt to >grap art by any other hadle is merely tofocus on other aspect or qu&lity >
the proposiion, which is usully irrelevantto the arf art. In a sense te? heeis aprimitie. He h;s no idea ou% art. How isfit tn that we know about his a/tivity? Because he has toQd usi is vr by his actions ate his actvity hastakenplace. That is, by theSfact tha he iswith several galleri s, puts the phyical residue of Jis ctiviy inXmuseums (and slMs them to art collectofs but as we have po1nted Uut, collectors are irrelevant to the condition ofart of a wok
'hat'he denieshis wor is art but plys the urtist is more thafHjust O parad,x. era secretl feels that art,ood is rrived at empirically. Thus, (s Ayer has statd The2eare no absolutely certai empiical prohosiios. It is only tautologie that are cerpain
EHpirical quesKions 're one and all hypotheses, which may be confirmed or discrdited in actualsense xpeience. And the p?opstion in which we rpcord hhe observations hat verXfy these hypotheses Pre theselves hypotheses whch are subject to the tet of further sense experience. Thus there is n finl propositiin.22 In other words, th roositons of art are no- factual, but inguistic n charac|er t,at is, thd do \ot descibe the behavior of physical, or eve mental objects; thy express definitions of art, or the formal conseque;ces of efinitons of art. Acordingly, we can say that art operates on a ogic. For we shall see hat te characteristic marktf a purely logEcal inquiry i` that it is concUned with the foma Consquencus of our einitioss(of art) an not with questions of e-pirical fact20 To repea, what rt has in common with
ogic an mjthematics is that it is taLoloy; i.e.,xthe art idea (or work) ad art are the same and can be pprec(ated as art wi
hout going otside te contex of art fr verifiction
On the other hand,fet us consider why ar ccnnot e Zor has difficulty whe pt att[mptsqto be) a syntKetic propositon.#Or, that is to say, when te truth or falsiy of its assertion is verifiale on empirical Xrouns
Ayer stats: . . . Te criterion by which we deteumine the aldity of an
a priori or snalytcalproposition isno slfficient to deter:ine th validity ofan epirical or synthtic proposition Fo it s characteistic of empirical propisitios that their va1viy is not purely formal. To say hat geometrical proposition, or a system of eometrical propoitions, s fa"se, is to say that it i se^f-contradictory. But an empiri/alproosit$ox,or asyste f epirical propositions,pay be free fromcontradiction an skll bS alse. It issaid to be fal;e not cause it is ormally defective, but ecause it fails to atisfyDsome matetial criterion.21 The#unreality of reaistic art is due to its framing as a, art propoitionin synthetic termm: one i4 always tempte} toverify the propositionempirically.Realisms synth$tjstate does nt brng oneto a circuxar wing back into a dTalogue with the larger framwork of questions aot the nature ofart (as does the work of 1alelich, Mondrian, wollock, Reinhardt, earlyRauschenber, Johns, Lichtenstin, Warhol Adre, Judd, Fvin, LeWit, Morris, and oters), but rater, one is"flung outof arts orbit into the infinite space of the human onditon
What one inds all throughout the wriings of Ad ,inMardt
s this very similartmesis of art7as-artR and tatqart is alwas dead, and lQving aWt is a deceptin23 Reinhardt hat a very clear idea about the nature of art, and his importance is faB from recognzed
Because fors o art that cav be considered synthetic pr3posi:ins are !erifiable by the world, that is to say, ko understand these propositionsone must leave the tautologiwal-like frmHwork o9 art and consider outsid@ information. But t consider it as art it is necessary to ignor this same Xutside informatin, because outside infvrmation (experientil qulitHes, to note) has its own intrinsic worYh. And to compreend rhis wo5th one does not need a state of art condition. Frm 9his it i eas to ralize that arts viability is not connected to the presentation of visual (or other) kinds of experience. Tat VaOmayIhav been one of ard extraneous funions in `he precediEg centuriez is not un[ikely. After all, mn in even the nineteenth century lied in a firly standardzd visualenironmentz Tat is, \t was rdinaily preictable as to what he would be coming into conact with dayafter day. His vis2l environment in the part of the world inZwhich he lived s faiTly consist=nt. In our time we have n xperientially drastically richer environment. One can fly all oNer theearh in a &ptter of ours and days, not months. W have She cinma, and coEor televisin, as wel asthe mDnmade spectacle of the lightsof Las Vegas or the skyscrapers ~f New York City.Thewhto sueak for noone lse. I arrived at tpese coclusions alon, and ndeed, it is rom this thnkiYg th/t my art since 1966 f not before) ev
lved. O"ly recently di
I realize after meeing Terr Atkinson that he and Michal B
ldwin shaoe similar,though cers are really little more thanhistorians of philos)ppy, Ldbrarians f the Truth, so tT speak. Onebegins to get the impressonathat there Wisnothing more to be said. And crtainly if one reilizes the ilLcaJions of Wit}gensteins thinking, and the thinking intluenced y him and after him, Continental^philoophy neeu nt seriously be conideredSere.3 Is there a reason for th& unreality` of /iloophy in our tmb? Perhaps this can be answered by looking;into the ifference bteen our time and ohe centuries prededing us. In the past man c)ncluions about the;world were based on hevnforEion hehad about it ift specifically lik the empircists, en gFnerally lkethe rationTists. Often i fact, thclo.enes beween sience and philowopl, becase]the appaent otherLfunctins o_ art (depictio of religiousthmes, portraitre of aristocats, detailing of arhitecture, etc.) usAart to c7ver up at
Bhen objects Vre reented8within thecontxt ofart (and until recentl objects always have been used) they areas eliible f[r aethtic considertin &s are any objet in the world, and anJasetic cnsiderati'n of a objectexiting on the realm ofart eans that th objects exitec :r functionig in an art ontex is irelvant to the eestetic judYment
The relation of aesthetics t art is not unlike thatBo aesthetics o arch]tecturen-that architecture has a very secfic funcion and hzw goodits dsign is is prim%rily rlated to how well it perf"rms its fun
tion. Thu-, judgments on whatit ooks like c[rresond to tase, and we cMn see that
h orghou istory diffe{ent examplLs of arc3itecure ae2Qrased at diffeet times dpending on txe aethetics ofYarticular epochs. Aesthetic thinkinghas ven gone s) fFr aW to atrictly aesthtc. AnEexample of a purely aesthetic#ojectbis a decorative object, for decoration pmry funcionis to add something t, s as tomke moe attractive; adorn; ornament,10 and this rltes drectly to taste
AndtFi leads s Rirectly tV formlist Lr and criticism.11 Formalistart (painting an> scu(ptre) is the vanguar of dcoration, and, stricty spakig, one cold reasonbly assert that its at condition isso minimal tat for allfunctinal purp=seE it is not art at all, bu pure 3xecises in aesthetics. rbove all thi8gs Clemen Greenbrg is the critic of tase. Behind every one o hi dncisions is n aesthetic judgmet,'wit those judgments reflecting his tas e
Andwht does histase reflecte The period he grew u in a a critic, the pDriod eal for h the fiftes.12 How elAe can oneacount fr, gizen his theories if hey have any logic to them a ll _ hisdisinteres in Frank Sfela, Ad Reinhardt, nd others a;licable to his hisorical scheme? Is it beca,s he is . . . basically uymYathetic on persona,ly exerientil \ouds?3 Or in other wnrd, ther worI doesnt suit hi tase? But n thepilosophic tabula r*sa of art, if smeone calls it art, aq Don JWdd has said ts a etc.y. If ne lfosat cotempor!ry art in this ight one ralizes th miniml creative efftrt taken on th part of formalist ariss spJciicaly, and Mll painers and X:lptors (woking as suYh today) generally
hi] brigsus tothe reaizatio thatformalistart and critiTigmPaccepts a a deinition of art one tha exists&solely on morpholgical grouns. zh
le a vast quanV3tX of similad ooking ojects orXimages (or visually relate objects r im4Ps) may seem to be related or onnected) becaueof a siilaity of visual/exeriential readingQ one canot caim from thi an artistic or con3eptual relationship
The function of art, s a question,'was eirst aised >yarcel Duchap. In fac iy is Marcel guchamp wom we an credit thgiving art its ow identity. (One can certainly see a tendency towarf thiseself-identifiction ofaart begning with Man$t and Czanne th:ough co Cuism,16 bu their works are i/id and ambiguous bycom)arisn with DuNhamps.) Moder art and the work before see:|d connectedvy vrtue of t`eir orhology. Another way fGputting it would be that arts language remained the sme, ?ut it was saying new things. The evet that ma|ecnceivabte he realization that it was possibleospeak another?languag andstill mkesense in at waWMarcel(Ducamps first unasisted Read-made
Wth the unassisted Ready-madek art &hnged ?ts focus from the form of the lanuage2to what was beung sid. ?h[ch means that it chaned the nature of art from ausion oW morphology to a question of fuFcon. Thio chang one from gppearance to
onc"|tion was the bginning of mern at and the ben:yng of conceptual art8 Al a&t {ater Duchamp) is conceptal in natur) becu
e'art oly .istsconcepually
The value f paricularantists afuer Duchamp can beoweighed accoding h how much tey queKOioned the n
ture of art; which is anoter uay of saying w4at they adde t thecBnception ofart or what wasnt there before they startedp Artist questhon the nature of art b prsening new propositions as to ~rtsVnature. ALd to do this one cannot concern oneslf wi@h the handed-d(wn lanuage of traditional art, s this activitx is baseddon the assumption that there s onfy one wByof framing rt 2ropsit_ns. But the very stuff of art is indeed greatly elated to creating new poposii:ns
The c@se is often me particRla/ly n referenceto Duchamp ^hat object of art (such as the H'ady-mades, yf courne, bu Sll at is `mplied in this) are judged as objets dart inlater yearsadthe artists inHentions become irrelevant. Such anargument isthe cse of a preconeived notion rderig together not nesessaril relaed facts The
Xint is this: a&sthetics, as e ave ponted o',3are;conceptually i#relUant to ar
Thus, ky physical thing ca become objet dat, that is to sy, can be onsidred tZsteful, aesthetically peasing, etc. But this has no#bearin 1nthe objectsgapplic tion to an art ontext; tht is, itY funcvioning in an art cotext. (E.g, if a collector tkes a paining, attQches legs, anduses t s a din{ng table its an act urelatd Io art or the artistbecause,as art, that want te artisXs intention.) It is obvious thentatUormalist citic)sms relince on morphosogy ladsneessar lywit& a bias toward th morphologyof traditional artw And in this sense tDeir criticsm Bs !t related
scietific method or any soBt o\ pircism (as Michael Fed,6wit is detailed des(riptions of paintings'and othXr schlarljparaphernalia would wnt us t} beleve).Fomalist criticism is no more tVan an analysis ofthe phyical adtTibutes of pmrtcularobjects tht hppen toiexist i1a morpholgical contex- But this dosnt adL any knowledge (orfacts] to our understanding of the nature or funcion of art. And neither does it2coment onwheter or not the objectq analyzed arH evenworks$of rt, in that foralist critics olways ypas the conc0ptual elemet in woks of a5.xachly why they dotoment on th conceptual elHment in worksFf rt is precisly beause formaist ar is only a9t by vitue of ies
mblance to arlier works ofart. ts a mindleOs art. Or, as Lucy Lippard so sccinctly describe Jules Oitkis paintings:rtheyre visua Muzak.h14 Frmalst4criticsand rtists alie do not uestion the nature of art, but a I hav said eseNhere: Being an artiet nw means to question thevnatue of art. gf one i questio-ing the nature of paintig, one Jannot bequetonig the nature ofart If an Artist aepts paivtOng (or sculpture) he s accepting the traditioF that goes withit. Th-ts befausethe word art s genral ad the word paijting is specifi. Piting Q kind of art
If you makeazntingsryou are already accepting (not sest\/nig)the nature of at. One is the accepting the nature of rt to be theEropan tadition of a painting-sulpture [ichotomy.15|Te strongest objection one can raseaginst a morphological justiiction for%traditional art is that morpholoicalnotions of art embodyan impled a prioiconceptof ar s possibilitieK. Ad such aG a piori coept of the9nsturemofar (as separate from anFlytically fr|medVart propositions or work which I will dscuss later) makes it, indeed, a pPiri: imposible to question the nature of art. And this questioning of the nature of rt\s a very importantconcept in understandin the function o art
And wFat holds rue for Duchamps +rk applKes aW w to mostbf he art after him. n oter wrds, th value of?ubis orGinvance is its idea in the realm ofart, not the physixal or HCal qSalities seen in a specific paintn or the particularization of cert*incoors I shapes or theFe colous and shapesuare the arts lnguage, not its maningconceptuall* as art. TB loo) upon a Cb:st masterwork now as -rt is nonsensical, concepually speaking, as far as art is concerned. (That Misual informa,ion tGat was nique inCubisms laguage has now bePn generally absored and h.s a lot to dowith the way in h=ch ne deas wit painting lingisticall.. [E.g.,
hat a ubist pantig meant exerimentallyand cotceptalYy to saGert ude Stn, is beon ourspecu^atioN becausethe sam_ ainting the ueant something dferentdthan%it doesnow.]) The value now f anHorig1na Cubist pinting is nCt unlike i mosg regects, an original anuscrip| by LȰd Byrn, or The pirit of St. Louis sit is#see^in thݖSmithsonian Institu$ion
(Inee9, 8useums fill the=Rery same unction as the Smithsonian nstitu6[on why els would he Jeude Paume wing of the Louvre exhibit Czannes and Van Gghs[palettDsas proudly s they do the) pailting?) Actua
wors of art are littleomore tha hiStorical curiosities. As ftr . art is coTcerned Van Goghs pain+iNg arekx wortq any more tha~ his {alte is.Theyare bth cllectors items.17VArt ives throghkinflue
Hing )ther art, not y existing a the physical residue ofan a[tists ideas. The reasonthat different artists from Whe past are brouht lves again is becuse ome aspect of their wor becomes @usable y living atist. Th=t here isAno truth a to what artis eems quite unrealized
What s the function o art, o te nature of art~ Ifwe continue our analogy cf the forms art takes as $eing arts ljnguge one carea4iethen hat a orkof arts a knd of propositon presented within theonext of art as a cmment on art WeIcan then go further n analyzethe types of propositions. . J. yers evaluationio a0ts distinction between analytica6d snhetic is usefulto us here: A proposition is analytic when it validity;depends soley.on he dfiitionsof the symbos]it contains, abdynhetic(when its validity is determined by th factof experine.18 The aalogy I will attempt to make i one betwee the ar6 condbion as the condition of the analyticproposition. In that they dont ppz to be believable as adthing els, or be abot anything (otr than art) the forms of_art mosA clearlyfinallyreferble only to ar have been forms clYsest to anQlytcal propositions
rks of ]rt areaaytic propositios. That is, if viewe within their context Aas art they provid n% inform%on w+tsover about any mattcr of act. A work of ar is a tautology in nhat it is a cresentaion of the artistsintention,that is, he is s`ying tht that particu
ar work of rt salt, which mean, ns a aefimition oX art. Thus, thmt it is art is tue a priori (wic is what Judd m ans whenhe sttes that if someo:e cals it ar_, its srt)
Indeed, it is nearly imposible t discuss art in neal tDms withou takig in tautologies for to attemp tB >grap art by any other hadle is erely tofocus on other aspect or qu<y >
the proosiion, which is usullysvrreleantto the arf art. In a ene te? heeis aprimitie. He h;s no idea ou% art. How isfit tn that we knowabout his a/tivity? Because he has toQd usi is vr by his actons ate his actvity hastakenplace. That s, by theSfact tha he iswith several galeri s, uts the phyical residue of Jis ctivi inXmuseus (and slMs them to art collectofs but as we have Bo1nte, Uut, collectors are irrelevant t. the conditio ofart of a wok
'ha'he denieshs wor is art but plys the urtist is more thafHjust O parad,x. ?ra secretl feels that Yrt,ood is rrived at empirically. Thus, (s Ayer has statd The2eare no absolutely certax empiical prohosiios. It is only autologie that are cerpa{n
EHpirical quesKions 're one and all hypotheses, which may be confimed or discrdited in actualsensV xpeience. A4d the p?opstion in whih we rpcord hhe observations hat vefy these hypotheses Pre theselves hypotheses w_ch are subject to the tet of furter sense experience. Thus there is n fnl propositiin.22 In oher words, th roositons ofart are no- factal, b:t inguistic n charac|er t,at is, thd do \ot descibe the behavior of physical, or eve mental obejts; thy express definitins of art, or the forml conseque;ces of efinitons of art. Acordingvy, we can say that ar oprates on a ogic. For we shall see hat te chara`teristc marktf a purely lgEcal Anquiry i` that it is concUned with te foma Consquencus of ourpeinitioss(of art) an not with questions of e-pirical fact20 To repe", what rt has in common with
ogic an mjthematics is that it is taLoloy; i.e.,xthe art idea (or work) ad art are he same and can be pprec(ated as art wi
hout going otside te contexofkart fr erifiction
On the other hand,fet us consider why ar ccnnot e Zor has difficulty whe pt att[mptsqto be) a syntKetic propositon.!Or, that is to say, when te truth or falsiy of its assertion is verifi:le on empirical Xruns
Ayr stats: . . . Te Nriterion by which we detemine+the aldity of an
a priori or snalytcalproposition isno slfficient to deter:ine th validty ofan epirical or synthtic proposition Fo it s characteistic of empirical propisitio that their va1vݽy is not purely formal. To say hat geometrical proposition, or a system of eometrical propoitions, s fa"se, is to say that it i se^f-contradictTry. But an empisi/alproosit$ox,or "syste f vpirical propositions,pay be free fromcontradiction an skll bS alse. It issaid to be fal;e not cause it is ormally defective, but ecause@it fails to atisyDsome matetial criterion.21 Te#unrealit= of reaistic art s due to its framing as a, art propoitionin synthetic termm: one i4 always tempte} toverif the propositionempirically.hRealisms synth$tjstate does nt brng oneto a circuxar wing back into a dTalogue with te largr framwork of questions aot the nature ofart (as does the work of 1alelich, Mondrian, wollock, Reinhardt, ZaryRauachenber, Johns, Lichtenstin, Warh>l 0dre, Ju:d, Fvin, LeWit, Morris, and oters), but ratjer, one is"flung outof art% orbit into te˓infinite spaLe of the human onditon
H hat one inds all troughout the wriings of Ad ,inMardt
s this very similartmesis of art7asartRand tatqart is alwas dead, and sQving aNt is a deceptin23 Reinhardt hat a very clear idea about the nature of art, and his importance is faB from recognzed
Because fors o art that cav be considered synthetic pr3posi:ins are !erifiable by the world, that is to say, ko understand these propositionsone must leave the tautologiwal-like frmHwork o9 art and consider outsid@ information. But t consider it a art it is necessary to ignor this same Xutside informatiI, because outsie infvrmation (experientil qlitHes, to note1 has its own intrinsic worYh. And to compreend rhis wo5th one does not need a state of art condition. Frm 9his it i eas to ralize that arts viabiity is not connected to the presentation of visual (or o9her) kinds of exerience. Tat VaOmayIhav been one of ard extraneous funiona in `he precediEg centuriez is /ot un[ikely. AfTer all, mn in eventhe nineteenth century lied in a firly standa3dzd visualenironmentz Tat is, \t was rdinaily preitable as to what he would be coming into coact with dayafer day. His vis2l environment in t-e part of the world inZwhich he lived s fHiTly consist=nt. In our time we have n xperientially drasticallj riAher environment. One ca fly l` oer theearh in a &ptter of urs and days, not months. W have She cinma, and cEor televisin, aswel asthe mDnmade spectacle of the limhtsof Las Vegas or the skyscrapers ~f New York City.Thewhto sueak for noone lse. I arrived attpese!coclusions alon, and ndeed, it is rom ths thnkiYg th/t 4y art since 1966 f not before) ev"lved. O"ly recently di
I realize afer meeing Terr Atkinson that he and Michal B
ldwin shaoe similar,though cers are really little ore thanhistorians of philos)ppy, Ldbrarians f the Truth, so tT speak. Onebegins to get the impressonathat there Wisnothing more to be said. And crtainly if one reilizes the ilLc|ions of Wit}gensteins thinking, andxthe thinkiTg intluenced˕y him and after himE Continental^p
iloophy neeu nt seriously be conideredSere.3 Is there a reason for th& unreality` of /iloophy in our tޗb? Perhaps this can be answered by looking;into the ifference bteen or time ad ohe `enturies prededing us. In the past man c)[cluions about the;world were based on hevnfor߰ion hehad about it ift specifically
ik the empircists, en gFnerally lkethe rationTists Often i fact, thlo.enes bewe( sience and philowopl, becase]the'appant otherLfunctins o_ art (depictio of religiousthmes, portraitre of aristocats, detailing o arhitecture, etc.) usAart to c7v-r up at
Bhen objetrictly aesthtc. AxEexample of a prely athetic#ojectbis a decorative object, for decoratio) pmry funcionis to add something t, s as tomke moe attractive; adorn; ornament,10 and this rltes drectlyto tast
AndtFi leads s Rirectly tV formlist Lr and criticism.11 Formalistart (painting an> s (ptre) is the vnguar o dcoration, and, stricty spakig, one cold reasonbly assert that its at condition isso minimal tat for allfunctinal purp=seE it is not art at all, bu pure 3xecises in aesthetics. rbove all thi8gs Clemen Greenbrg is the critic of tase. Behind every one o hi dncisions is n aesthetic judgmet,'wit those judgments reflecting his tas e
Andwht does histase reflecte The period hekgrew u in a a critic, the pDriod eal for h the fiftes.>w How ele can oneacount fr, gizen histheor}es if hey have any logic to thema ll _ hisdisinteres in Frank Sfela, Ad Reinhardt, nd others a;licable to his hisoical scheme? Is it beca,s he is . . . basically uymYathetic on ersona,ly exrientil \ouds?3 Or in otherwnrd, the_r worI doesntsuit hi tase? ut n thepilosophic tabula r*sa of art, if smeone cals it art, aq Don Wd has said ts a etc.y. If ne lfost cotempor!r art in this ught one ralizes th miniml creatie efftrt taken 1n th part of formalist ariss spJciical6, and Mll painersand XPlptors (woking as suYh today) generally
hi] brigsus tothe reazati hatformalistart and critiTigmaccepts aa deinition of art one tha exists&solely on morpholgica; grouns.z
le a vast quanV3mX of similad ooking ojets orXimages (or visually relate\ objects r im4Ps) may seem to be related or onnected) becaueof a siilaity of visual/xeriential readinϒQ one canot caim from thi aS artistic or con3eptual relat!onship
The functi"n of art, s a question,'wax erst ai;ed >yace D8chap. In fac iy is Marcel guchamp wom we an cr9dit thgving art its o identity.O(One can certainly see a tendency towarf thiseslf-identifiction ofaart begning with Man$t and Czanne th:ough {o Cuism,16 bu their works are i/id and ambiguous bycom)arisn with DuNhamps.) Moder art and the work before see:|d connectedvy vrtue of t`eir orhology. Another way fGputting it would be that arts language remained thesme, ?ut it was saying new things. She evet that ma|ecnceivabte the rea9ization that it was possibleospeak another?languag andstill mMesense in at waWMarcel(Ducamps firsunasisted Read-made
Wth the unassisted Ready-madek art &hnged ?ts focusfrom the form of the lanuage2to what was beung sid. ?h[ch means that it chaned the nature of art from ausion oW orphology to a question of fuFcon. Thio chang one from gpearance to
onc"|tion was the bginning of mern at and the bn:yng of conceptual art8 Al a&t {ater Duchamp) is conceptal in natur) becu,e'art oly .istsconcepually
The value\f paricularantists afYer Duchamp can beoweighed accoding h how much te> queKioned the n
ture of art; which is anoter uay of saying w4at they adde t thecBnceptin ofart or what zasnt there befor they startedp Artist questhon the nature of ar b prsning new propositions as to ~rtsVnzture. ALd to do this one cannot concern oeslf wi@h the handed-d(wn lanuage of trditional7art, s 8h+s activitx is baseddon the assumption that there s onfy one wByo}framing rt 2r6psit_ns. Bt the very stuff of art is indeedbgreatly elated to crea_ing new poposii:ns
The c@se Vs oten me paticRla/y n referenceto Duchamp ^hat object of art (such as the H'ady-mades, yf courne, u Sll at is `mplied in this) 9re jdged as objets dart inlater yearsadthe artists inHentions becom irrelevant.+Such anargumen iste ce of a preconeived notion rderig together not nesessaril relaed facts The
Xint
is this: a&sthetics, as p ave ponted o',3are;concptually i#re0Uant t. a
Thus, ky physCclthing ca becom objet dat, that is to sy, can be onsidred tZsteful, aesthetically peasing, etc. But this has no#bearin 1nthe objectsgapplic tion to an art ontext; tht
s, itY funcvining in an art cotet. (E.g0 if a collector tes a paining, atQches legs, anduses t s a din{ng table its an act urelatd Io art or the artistbecaus,as art, that want te artisXs intention.) It is obvious hentatUormalist citic)sms relince n morphosogy ladsneessar lwit& a bias toward th morphIlogyof traditional artw And in this sens tDeir criticsm Bs !t related
scietfic method r any soBt o\ pircism (as MichaelFd,6wit is detailed des(riptions of paintings'and othXr schlarljparaphernalia would wnt us } beleve).Fomalist criticism is no more tan an analysis fthe phyica adtTibutes of mrtcularojets %ht hppen tiexist i1a morpholgical contex- But this dosnt adL any knowledge (ofacts] to our undrskanding of the nature or funcion of art. grap art byany othei hadle is erely toocus on other yspect or qu<y >
the proosiion, which is usullysvrreleantto the ar ujectPve meaings are usless to8anyOne othOr than those involved wit Jim persona{ly. AndZtheir specific quality put;them outside ort| context
I do no make art, Rchrd Serra sas, I a engaged in n actiBit;i someoNe wants 7o call it art,thats his busines,butits not up to me o decide hat Thas ll figured out later. erra, then,'is ve/y mch aware of the implicatons of his work.}If Serr isindeed just figuring out whax lea@ does (gravitationaYy, mecuary etc.)s why souldanyone think of i9 as art? If;he'doesnt take tye resosibility of it being art/ who can, orsul|? His work certaonly apearsto e empiricll verifiablem lFad cando, nd be used for, manyEphysical activithes. In itself this does>!nythingbut ead us intoa dialogue aboutwt8enature,>f art. In a ene te? hees aprimitie. He h;s no idea ou% art. How isfit tXn that we knowabout his a/tivity? Because he has toQd us is vr by his actons ate his actvity hastakenplace. That s, by the\fact kha he iswifh several galeri s, uts the phyhical rejidue5of Jisctivi inXmuseus (and slMs them to art collectofs but as we have Bo1nte, Uut, collectors are irrelevant . Uhe coditio ofart of a wok
'ha'he denieshs wor is art but plys the urtist is more thafHjust O parad,x. ?ra secretl feels that Yr,ood is rrived at empirically. Thus, (s Aer has statd The2eare no absolutely certax empiical prohoiios. It is only autologie that ar cerpa{n
EHpirical quesKiCns 're ne and all hypotheses, which may be onfimed or discrdited in actualsgnsV xpeience. A4d the p?opstion inwhih we pcord hhe observations hat vefy these hypotheses Pre theselves hypotheses w_ch are subject to the tet of furter nse experience. Thusthere is n fnl propositiin.22 I oher words, th roositons o*art are no- factal, b:t inguistic n chaac|er t,at is, thd do \ot descibe the behavior)of physical, or eve ental obejts; thy express definitins of art, or the forml conseque;ces ofefiitons of art. Acordingvy, we can say that ar oprates on a ogic.BFor w shall see hat te chara`teristc marktf a purely lgEcal Anquiry i` that it s concUned with te foma Consquencus oP ourpeinitioss(of art) an not with questions of e-pirical fact0 To repe", what rt has in common with
ogic an mjthematics is that it is taLoloy; i.e.,xthe art idea (or work) ad art are he same and ~a* be pprec(ated as ar@ wi
hout going otside e contexofkart fr erifiction 3
On the other hand,fetus consider why ar ccnKot e Zor has difficulty we p att[mptsqto be) a syntKetic propositon.!Or, that is to say, whente truth or falsiy of its asserRion is erifi:le on empirical Xruns
Ayr stats: . . . Te Nriterion by which we etemine+the aldity of an
a priori or snalytcalproposi~ion isno slfficieAt to deter:ine Thvalidty ofan epirical or synthtic poposition Fo it s characteistic of emiric l prpisiio that their va1vݽy is not purely formal. To say hat geometrical propositio, or a system of eometrical propoitios, s fa"se, s to sa that it i se^f-contradictTry. Bu) an empisi/alproosit$ox,or "syste f vpirical propositions,pay be free fromcontradiction an skll bS alse. It issaid to be fal;e not cause it is ormally defective, but ecause@it fails to atisyDsome matetia criterion.21 Te#unrealit= of reaistic art s due to its framing asa, art propoitionincsynthetic termm: one i4 always tempte} toverif the propositioneepirially.hRealisms synth$tjstate doesnt brng oneto a circuxar 'wing back into a dTalogue w
l 0de, Ju:d, Fvin, LeWit, Morris, and oters), but ratjer, one is"flung outof art% orbit into te˓infinite spaLe of [he human onditon
H hat one inds all troughout the wriOings of Ad ,inMrdt
s this very similartmesis o art7asartRand tatqart is alwa. ded, and sQving aNt is a deceptin23 Reinhardt hat a very clea idea about the nature of art, and his importance is faB from recognzed
Becase fors o art that av e considered synthetic pr3poi:ins are !erifiable by the world, that is to say, ko understand these propositions8ne must leave the tautologiwal-like frmHwork o9 art and consider outsid@ information. But t cosider it a art it is necessary to ignormBhis same Xutside {nformatiI, because outsie infvrmation (experientil qlitHes, to note1 has is own intrinsic worYh. And to compreend rhis wo5th one doe bot need a state of art condition. Frm 9his it i eUsСo ralize that arts viabiity is not connected to the presentation of visual (or oher) kinds of exerience. Tat VaOmayIhav been one of ard extraneous funiona in `he precediE/ centuriez is /ot un[ikely. AfTer all, men in eventhe nineteenth century lied in a firly stands3zd isualenironmentz Tat is, \t was rdinaily preitable as to what he would be oming 2nto coac with dayafer ay. His vis2l environment in t-I pArt of the world inZwhich he lived s fHiTly consist=nt. In our time weEhave n xperientially drasticallj r(Aher environment. One ca fly l` oer thUearh in a &ptter of urs a$d days, not months. W have She cina, and cEor televisin, aswel asthe mDnmade spectacle of the limhtsof Las Vegas or the skyscrapers ~f New York City.Thewh ismBre likeyy t find Results es coZformiYg and predictble. It=is D modernarts possession of a /nguage wth theyshortst !istory that the plausibility of he abndonment of th Hanguage bacoes mUst possible. It i uderstnable then that the art tha cameout o We$ternpanting anP scuptur is theVost engetic, uetioning (o its nature), and *e l4ast assumng o all t%e general artconcers In the iUal ~nalysis, hwever,%ll of the ats have bu(in?ittgestins terms) a 0amily esemblaze
Ye the vriousYqualitiesrelatable to a art condiion possessed by petry, the novel the0Cine~ th theatre, and vari.us ors of usi, etc., is t[at aspet gf them most elible to e funcionoof art asa(serted here
Is not the decline of poetry relatable to the impiedmetaphyNics from poetry use of comTon languane as anarN angage?24 In New York the last decadent stages of poetry ca1 be seen in theto sueak for noone lse. I arrived attpese!coclusions alon,Rand ndeed, it is rom ths thnkiYg th/t 4y art since 1966 f not before) ev"l5ed. O"ly recent;y di
I realize afer meeing Terr Akinson that he and Michal B
ldwin shaoe similar,though cers are really little ore thanhistorians of philos)ppy, Ldbrarians f the Truth,Kso tT speak. Oneb_ginx to get the impressonathat here W)snoth
ng more to b` said.And crtainly if one reilizes the ilLc|ions of Wit}gensteins 7hinking, andxthethinkiTg ntlunced˕y himand afr himE Continental^pZiloophy neeu nt seriously be coniAeredSere.3 I
there a reson for th& unreality` of /iloophy in our tb? Perhaps this can be answered by laoking;into the iffernce bteen or time a~d ohe `enturies predding us. In the past man c)[cluions about the;world were bfsed on hevnTor߰ion hehadabout it ift specifically
ik the empirciss, en gFnerally lkethe rationTis Ofte[ i fact, thlo.enes bewe( sience and philowpl, ,case]the'appant otherLfunctins o_ art (depictio of religiousthmes, portraitre of aristocats, detailing o arhitecture, etc.) usAart toc7v-r up ֒t Bhen objetrictly esth s (tre) is the vnguar o dcoration, and, stricty spakig, one cold reasonbly asser that its at condition #ss minimal ta for allfunctinal pup=seE it s not art at all, bu pure 3xecises in aesthetics/ rbove all thi8gs Clemen Greenbrg is the critic of tase. Behind every one o hi dncisions is n aestetiX judgmet,'wit those judgments reflecting his tas e
Andwht does hstase reflecte The period hekgrew u in a a critic, the pDriod eeal;for h the ifte.w How ele can oneacount fr, gizen histheor}es if hey dave any logic to th~ma ll _ hisdisinteres in Frank Sfela, Ad Reinhardt, %d others a;licable to his hisoical sheme? Is it becasghe is . . . basically ymYahetic on ersona,ly exrientil \ouds?3 Or in otherwnrd, the_r worI doesnɦuit hi tase? ut n thepilosophic tabula r*sa of art, if smeone cals it_art, aq Don Wd has said ts a etc.y. If ne lfost cotempor!r art in this ught one ralizes th miniml creatie efftrt taken 1n th part of formalist ariss spJciical6, and Mll painersand XPlptors (wokina as suYh today) generally
hi] brigsus tothe reazati hatformalistart and critiTigmaccepts aa deinition of art one tha exists&solely on mrpholgica; grouns.z
le a vast quanV3mX of similad ookingojets orXimages (or visually relate\ objects r im4Ps) may seem to be related or Hnnected) becauf a siilaity of visual/xeriential readinϒQ one canot caim from thi aS artstic or con3eptual relt!onship
The functi"n of art, s a uestion,'wax erst ai;ed >yace D8cap. In fac iy is Marcel guchamp wom we an cr9dit thgving art its oidentity.O(One can certinly see a tendency towarf thisesl-identifiction ofat begning with Mant and Czanne t:ough {o Cuism,16 bu their works are i/id and ambiguous bycom)arisn with DNhamps.) Moder art andthe work before see:|d connectedvy vrtue of t`eir orhology. Another wa\ fGputtingit would be t at artsǓlanguag` remained thAsme, ?ut it was saying new things. She evIt that ma|ecnceivabte the rea9ization that it was possibleosoeak another?lnguagR andstill mMesense in at waWMarcel(Ducamps firsunasisted Read-made
Wth the unassisted Ready-madek art &hnged ?ts focusfromAthe form of the lanuage2to what was beung sid.7?h[ch means that iy haned th1 nature of art from ausion oW orphology to a question of fuFcon. Thio chang one from gpearance to
onc"|tion was the bginning of mern t and the n:yng of conceptual art8 Al a&t {ater Duchamp) is conceptal in natur) becu,eMart oly .istsconcepually
The value\f paricularant[sts afYer Duchamp can eoweighed accoding h how much te> queKioned the n
ture o! art; whEch s anotr uay of saying w4at they adde t thecBnceptin ofart or what zasnt there befor they startedp Artist questhon the nature ofar b prsning ew propositions as to ~rtsVnzture. ALd to do this one cannot concern oeslf wi@h the handed-d(wn lanuage of trditional7ar, s 8h+s activitx is baseddon the assumption that there s onfy one wByo}framing rt 2r6psit_ns. Bt the very stuff of art is indeedbgreatly elated to crea_ing new poHosi:ns
The c@se Vs oten me paticRla/y n referenceto Duchamp w ^hat object of art (such as the H'ady-mades, yf ourne, u Sll a is `mplied in this) 9re jdge
as objets dart inlater yearsadthe artists inHentions becom irremevant.+Such anargtmen iste ce of a preconeived notion rderu}g together not nesessaril relaed facts The
Xint
is this: a&sthetics, as p ave ponted o',3are;concptually i#re0Uant t. a
Thus, ky physCclthing ca bcom objet dat, that is to sy, can be onsidred tZstefuw, aesthetically peasing, etc. But this =as no#bearin 1nthe bjectsgapplic tion to an art ontext; tht
s, itY funcvining in an art cotet. (E.g0 if aM%ollector tes a pai`ing, atQches legs, anduses t s a din{ng table its an act urilatd Io art or the artistbecaus,as art, that want te artisXs intention.) It is obvious entatUrmalist citic)sms relince n morphos:gy ladsneessar lwit& a bias toward th morphIlogyof traditional artw Apd in this ses tDeir criticsm Bsɵ!t related h scietficmethd r any soBt o\ pircism (as MichaelFd,6it is detailed des(riptions of paintings'and othXr schlarljparaphernalia woud wnt us } beleve).Fomalist criticism is no more tan an analysis fthe phyica adtTibutes of mrtcularojets %ht hppen tiexist i1a morpholgical cont_x- Bnt this dosnt adL any knowledg (ofacts] to our undrskanding of the nature or funcion of ara. grap art byany othei hadle is erely toocus on other yspect or q7<y >
the proosiioh, which is usullybvrreleantto the r ujectPve meaings areusless to8anOne othOr than those involved wit Jim persona{ly. AndZtheir specific quality put;them outside ort| context
I do no make art, Rchrd Serra sas, I a engaged in n actiBit;i someoNe wantsy7o callkit art,thatsis busines,butits not up to me o decide hat Thas ll figured out later. erra, then,'is je/y mch aware of the implicatons of his work.}If Serr isindeed just figuring out whax lea@ does (gravitationaYy, mecua!nythingbt ead us intoa dialogue aboutwt8eDature,f art.FIn a ene te? hees aprimitie. He h;s no idea ou% art. How ifit tXn tht we knoAabout his a/tivity? Because he has toQd us is vr by his actons ate his actvity hastakenplace. That s, by the\fact kha he iswifh several galeri s, uts the phyhical rejidue5of Jisctivi inXmuseus (and s
Ms hem to art collectofs bu as we hae Bo1nte,Uut, collectors are irrelevant . Uhe coditio ofart of a wok
'ha'he deniess wor is art but plys the urtist is more thafAjust O parad,x. ?ra secretl feels that Yr,ood is rr)ved at empircally. Tus, (s Aer has statd The2eare no absolutely certax empiical prohoiios It is only autologie that ar cerpa{n
EHpirical queYKiC6s 're ne and all hypotheses, which may be onfimed or discrdited in actualsgnsV xpeience. A4d th p?opstion inwhih we pcor hhe observations hat vefy these hypotheses Pre theselves [ypothees w_ch are subject to the tet of furter ne experince. Thusthere is n fnl propositiin.22 I oher words, th roositons *art are no- fcthl, b:t nguistic n6chaac|er t,at is, thd do \ot desbe the behavior)of physica, or eve ental obejts; thy express yefinitins of art, or the forml conseque;ces ofefiitons of at. Acordingvy, we cn say that ar oprats on a ogY.BFor w shall see hat te chara`teristc marktf a purel4 lgEcal Anquiry i` that it s concUned with te foaa Consquencus oP ourpeinitioss(of art) annot with uestions of e-pirical fact0 To epe",what rt has in common wit$
ogic an mjthematics is that it is taLoloy; i.e.,>the art ide o work)ad art are he same and ~* be pprec(ated as ar@ wi
hout going otside e contexofkart fr erihiction 3
On the other hand,fjetus consider why ar ccnKot e Zor has dificultywe p att[mptsqto be) a syntKetic propositon.!Or, t$at is to say, whente truth or fasiy of its asserRion is rifi:e on empirical Xruns
Ayr stats: . . Te Nriterion by which we etemine+the aldity of an
apiori or snlytcalproposi~ion isno slfficieAt to deter:ine Thvalidty ofan epirical or synttic poposition Fo it s characteistic of emiric l prpisiio that their va1vݽy is not purely forma_. To say hat geometrica propositio, or a system of eomtrical propoiJios, s fa"se, s to sa that it i se^f'contradictTry. Bu) an empisi/alproosit$ox,or "syste f vpiricalpropositions,pay be free fromcontradiction an skll bS alse. It issaid to be fal;e not cause it i ormall defective, but ecaseCit fails to atisyDsome matetia criterion.21 Te#unrealit= of reaistic art s due to its framing asa, rt propoitionincsynthetic termm: one i4 always temvte} toverWf the proposition+eepirally.hRealisms synth$tjstate doesnt brng oneto a circuxar='wing back into a dTalogue w