Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn

By Eve Meltzer

By the early 1960s, theorists like Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, and Barthes had created a world ruled by signifying structures and pictured through the grids of language, information, and systems. Artists soon followed, turning to language and its related forms to devise a new, conceptual approach to art making. Examining the ways in which artists shared the structuralist devotion to systems of many sorts, Systems We Have Loved shows that even as structuralism encouraged the advent of conceptual art, it also raised intractable problems that artists were forced to confront.
 
Considering such notable art figures as Mary Kelly, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, and Rosalind Krauss, Eve Meltzer argues that during this period the visual arts depicted and tested the far-reaching claims about subjectivity espoused by theorists. She offers a new way of framing two of the twentieth century’s most transformative movements—one artistic, one expansively theoretical—and she reveals their shared dream—or nightmare—of the world as a system of signs. By endorsing this view, Meltzer proposes, these artists drew attention to the fictions and limitations of this dream, even as they risked getting caught in the very systems they had adopted. The first book to describe art’s embrace of the world as an information system, Systems We Have Loved breathes new life into the study of conceptual art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jul 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9780226007915

Book preview

EVE MELTZER is assistant professor of visual studies at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2013 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2013.

Printed in China

22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13      1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-00788-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-00791-5 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meltzer, Eve, author.

Systems we have loved: conceptual art, affect, and the antihumanist turn / Eve Meltzer.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-00788-5 (cloth: alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-00791-5 (e-book)

1. Conceptual art.   2. Structuralism.   I. Title.

N 6494.C63M45 2013

709.04'075—dc23 2012025206

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn

Eve Meltzer

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

Contents

Acknowledgments

Antepartum

1. The Dream of the Information World

2. Turning Around, Turning Away

3. The Expanded Field and Other, More Fragile States of Mind

4. After Words

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

I wrote this book over many years, in many places, and with many forms of support. Each has mattered to its making in distinct and special ways.

Systems We Have Loved first took shape at the University of California, Berkeley, at a time when that institution was—at least for those of us there—the center of the intellectual universe. It was Kaja Silverman who first and in the most profound way made that universe matter to me. Through her close readings of Freud and Lacan, and her own writing, Kaja explained the ways in which feeling and theory become intertwined. Anne Wagner made the 1960s and ’70s meaningful to me in ways nuanced and vivid, material and political; she has become a model for what art history can be. I am fortunate to have received the generous and incisive feedback of the brilliant Tim Clark. Likewise, Shannon Jackson provided great support as a reader of this text in its early days.

Many others at Berkeley contributed to this book. I thank Judith Butler for demonstrating, through her leadership of the Department of Rhetoric, that going out on a limb is the interesting place to be. Fred Dolan and Margaretta Lovell also helped to shape my direction in these pages. I am deeply appreciative for my dear friends Elise Archias, Huey Copeland, and Bibiana Obler; each read drafts of this book at various stages and provided the right measure of criticism and enthusiasm to keep the project evolving. To Huey, especially, I owe more phone hours than can ever be repaid. At a critical juncture, Andrew Moisey offered to read the entire manuscript and subsequently pushed me to call it finished. Many others from Berkeley and beyond deserve special mention for their intellectual camaraderie and invaluable support: Nina Dubin, Matthew Jesse Jackson, John Muse, Julian Myers, Zabet Patterson, Darien Shanske, Michael Suarez, Domietta Torlasco, Andrew Uroskie, Peter Wegner, and Lynne Zeavin.

Three years as a Stanford Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow gave me the invaluable rewards of time, the understanding that comes with it, and an interdisciplinary community of fellows from whom I learned so much. I want to thank Seth Lerer for bringing me to Stanford University and orchestrating such a productive program. My fellow Mellon fellows—especially Lisa Cooper and Graham Larkin—were fantastic interlocutors. Thanks go, too, to the Department of Art and Art History there, especially Bryan Wolf, Pamela Lee, and Jody Maxmin, for giving me a discipline to call my own and terrific students to work with. Peggy Phelan further enriched those days in the Palo Alto sun by including me in her Mellon Foundation Workshop, The Politics of Action: Art and the Public Sphere.

I am fortunate to be part of New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study—a remarkably intellectually capacious place. My wonderfully convivial colleagues and my students must know that they have also helped me to refine the ideas presented here. To Pepe Karmel of the Department of Art History—I owe many thanks for creating opportunities for me to share my work and for maintaining my art historical imprimatur at NYU. For supporting me through all of the turns I chose to make over these years, special thanks go to Stephen Duncombe, Lisa Goldfarb, Karen Hornick, Brad Lewis, Kim Phillips-Fein, Stacy Pies, George Shulman, and the fabulous Susanne Wofford.

Beyond these institutions, I have been lucky to have had the example and support of many scholars in the fields of contemporary art history and visual studies. Richard Meyer and Miwon Kwon have long been wonderful models. Carrie Noland took enthusiastic interest in my work at an early moment by inviting me to share it at the 2002 UCI Humanities Research Institute, Gesture as Inscription: Movement, Art, Writing. Jessica Wyman pursued my work on Robert Morris for publication; Sypros Papapetros did the same with respect to my thinking on Rosalind Krauss’s Expanded Field paradigm. For inviting me to serve as faculty at the 2010 Stone Summer Theory Institute, Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic, I owe a great debt of gratitude to James Elkins, the other faculty he convened there—Jay Bernstein, Darmuid Costello, and Hal Foster—and the students who participated, all of whom helped me test some of the newly re-conceived aspects of my polemic, particularly those involving affect theory. The arguments contained in this book have been presented at many other seminars, symposia, and conferences unnamed here—for each occasion and its participants, I am thankful.

Funding for the research, writing, and production of this book was generously provided by several sources: the Department of Rhetoric and the Graduate Division at UC Berkeley; the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program; the American Council of Learned Societies; the UC Berkeley Townsend Center for the Humanities; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. For making it possible that the artworks I discuss appear in these pages as beautifully as they do, I thank NYU’s Humanities Initiative for a Grant-in-Aid as well as Dean Susanne Wofford, who generously awarded me a grant from the Dean’s Discretionary Fund.

This book was crafted around the indispensable resources of several archives, collections, and individuals. I am grateful to all, in particular: the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, particularly Judy Throm; the Leo Castelli Gallery; Sarah Kovach at Dia Art Foundation; the Hayward Gallery, London; Nancy Holt; the Museum of Modern Art Archive, New York; David Platzker at Specific Object; the Tate Gallery Store, London, especially John Bracken; Julia Jachs at the Generali Foundation; Xan Price at the Sonnabend Gallery. Early on, Susan Jenkins shared with me her findings on the Information show. Robert Morris made nearly a hundred of his Blind Time drawings available to me and also responded to my questions. Mary Kelly’s generosity has exceeded my capacity to make use of it. It is her work that frames this book and fuels much of what I have to say in these pages. The book is, quite simply, unimaginable without her and her work.

For making the process of publication a supportive, patient, and most pleasurable one, I am grateful to the University of Chicago Press. I thank most especially my editor, Susan Bielstein, and her assistant, Anthony Burton, as well as Erin DeWitt for her careful copyediting. I am profoundly grateful to both of my readers, especially Jennifer L. Roberts, whose feedback provided me with the most astute and transformative criticism that this book has endured. Matthew Morrocco’s terrific work with images enhances the book throughout. Without the tireless precision and dedication of McCallan Stringer, my research assistant, I simply do not know how I would have gotten the job done.

To my parents, Beth and David Meltzer; Julia and Joe, my sister and brother; Alan Sieroty, my uncle; and our growing family—thank you for filling my world with good humor and understanding, great food, and stunning photographs.

I would not be able to write, much less think so long and hard about such a thing as affective experience, were it not for the nearly two decades I have spent as friend and partner to Joseph Thometz. He has accompanied me through a lifetime of talk of conceptualism and structuralism, all the while safeguarding that there would always be room for more, most especially our two children—Sammy and Thea Mia—who daily show me what a more extended, indeed, expansive subjectivity feels like. To the three of you, and to the us that you have made for me—I dedicate this book.

Antepartum

Conceptual art is a bunk. . . . It’s a felt, it’s feeling, it’s felt. I feel it. It’s all bullshit what you are talking about. Bullshit. . . . Did you ever take acid? . . . I am a human being. . . . I just swing with all these human responses. I meet people. I meet a ditch digger and I say, How are you doing today? And they say, Look at the sky. And I look at the sky and I say, Beautiful, man. And what do you say? You say, Make a system out of it.—Robert Smithson, playing a West Coast artist, in East Coast / West Coast (1969)

The tendency of modern inquiry is more and more towards the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is everywhere.—E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871), cited epigraphically in Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969)

Antepartum—the silent, ninety-second, Super 8 film-loop installation produced by Mary Kelly in 1973—begins in darkness.¹ Like the moon, the body on the screen comes into visibility only because of the light (fig. 0.1). This orb moves quickly through its phases: first crescent, then quartered, and finally settling, waxing gibbous. What comes into view is the swollen, pregnant abdomen of a nude woman, her body made whole to us once we recognize the masses of flesh above as the undersides of her breasts, and then follow the dark line below as it bisects the abdomen and drops from navel to pubis. What this more oriented vantage reveals is that we are in fact looking up through the eye of the camera from below, watching this body’s movements as they are tracked as much by the frame of the filmic shot as by the light into which, and then away from which, the belly moves with each breath that the woman takes.

Antepartum is less well-known and remarked upon than its sequel, Kelly’s expansive, multi-part Post-Partum Document (1973–79), wherein the artist purports to record the first years of the life of her son as he makes his gradual entry into language and the symbolic order—his cultural kidnapping, as Lucy Lippard once wrote (fig. 0.2).² This is a useful fact to know, not least because it mirrors, on the one hand, the sheer excess of the later work, the way in which the Document inundates the viewer with a glut of difficult-to-decipher information, diagrams, schemas, theoretical paradigms, and so on—all of which reflect the aesthetic and theoretical idioms of Kelly’s day; and, on the other hand, the sparseness or minimalism of the earlier work: the brute, frontal facticity of its filmic presence. Here is a body, the body of the artist. To be sure, it is presence that Antepartum seems to want to convey if not anticipate, not just by the visual force of the fecund shape that subtly, gently rises and swells over and again on the screen as it breathes—indeed, lives—but also by the patient and watchful attention of the camera’s gaze that makes this body never disappear from view. By the simple logic of an infinite loop, presence is secured. Another difference, then, obtains: Post-Partum Document, as we shall later see, appears resolutely progressive in its development from the child’s first fecal traces to his inscription of his own name, at which point it could be said—as the structuralist psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has—that the child has faded or disappeared, having given up being and presence as the cost of his entry into the cultural order.³ Antepartum, on the other hand, is recursive, suspended—although not quite waiting for the subject to appear as one would say of other important works of the period. Take Frantz Fanon’s 1952 account (published in English in 1967) of his experience in the movie theater: with the phrase I wait for me, he anticipates his own abjection on the screen and in the eyes of others, his own coming into appearance as an obdurately racialized subject.⁴ Or recall Faith Wilding’s 1972 poem Waiting, performed as a fifteen-minute monologue at the Womanhouse exhibition in Los Angeles. There she chronicled live all of the ways in which the female subject exists in the pained and eternally deferred activity of waiting. Waiting for someone to hold me. . . . Waiting to grow up. . . . Waiting for him to tell me I’m beautiful. . . . Waiting for my flesh to sag. . . . Waiting for sleep. Yet Antepartum is not so much in waiting as it is stilled—perhaps stalled even—not unlike many other works from the decade: Vito Acconci’s Centers (1971) and Air Time (1973), Lynda Benglis’s Now (1973), Nancy Holt and Richard Serra’s Boomerang (1974)—to mention but a few.⁵

0.1 Mary Kelly, Antepartum, 1973. Still photograph, black-and-white 8mm film loop transferred to DVD (edition of 5), 1:30 min. Generali Foundation, Vienna; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Stanford University. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the artist.

There is yet another presence in Antepartum, and it is also moving. There is more than one body in the image we see on the screen. As the filmic frame tracks the movement of the artist’s body, that body, in turn, registers the movement of the unborn being within. Sweeping her hands back and forth across her belly, Kelly responds by returning this movement with a tender, searching touch. She repeats the gesture, over and again. Here, then, is the artist. The artist is a woman, and she is both producing and reproducing before our very eyes.

The year—to repeat—was 1973. It seems odd, if not anachronistic, to think of Antepartum together with what we already know or at least tend to recall when conjuring this historical moment: the end of over a decade of U.S. combat activity in Southeast Asia; the Watergate scandal; the waning effects of and fallout from the counterculture movements in the United States and the United Kingdom, which had arguably peaked in 1972; the legalization of abortion with the U.S. Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade—just to begin the familiar list. And from the vantage of artistic practice in this country, 1973 is also the year most often cited as the point at which the 1960s as a period of cultural, political, as well as aesthetic transformations and achievements, including the conceptual art movement, effectively ended.⁶ And what with so much presence, Antepartum also seems a strange, perhaps even retrograde place to begin an account of the antihumanist subject: a disembodied, disaffected subject—or at least, as Fanon and Wilding would have it, only injuriously affected; the subject who is abducted and then produced by an ideological world that is always in place and already awaiting—a world that Kelly does not yet seem to recognize with her repetitive maternal caress.

0.2 Mary Kelly and son, photograph of recording session, 1975, included as frontispiece, Post-Partum Document (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Photo: Ray Barrie. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the artist.

I begin this book with Mary Kelly’s Antepartum because it wants both to announce and to address the imminent birth of a subject, if not the subject—to make it its subject matter. So, too, is my aim with this book: to reconsider the dominant late twentieth-century view of the human subject as that figure was foretold, secured, and contested in major works of art, philosophy, and literary criticism of the time. To this end, the book focuses on two of the most transformative movements of the twentieth century, both of which, I argue, have wrestled with this subject: conceptualism and structuralism. With the term conceptualism, I mean to invoke those aesthetic strategies that emerged in the late 1960s, are said to have peaked by 1973, and were associated with the radical dematerialization of the art object. To be sure, these moves were also prompted by the social and political atmosphere surrounding the Vietnam War as well as the critique of commodity culture, institutions, and heavily administrated experience—as many have recounted carefully before me.⁷ Such strategies were varied in appearance. Sometimes artists (say, for example, Adrian Piper, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, Dan Graham, and Mel Bochner, among so many others) chose language as their medium—if not words themselves, then forms that appeared to be like a language (e.g., grids, signs, text), which by 1970 came to fall under the sign of information. Because their rhetorics resisted the conventional ideology of visibility, conceptualist strategies are often considered resolutely anti-visual. Historically, this perception has affected our readiness to see these strategies as nonetheless taking shape within the visual field, and to read them in light of the formal structure of their visual ambivalence. In many of its iterations, conceptual aesthetics also concerned the nature of art itself and thus has long been associated with a marked form of self-reflectivity and self-criticality that is continuous with the modernist tradition but—as I argue in the pages that follow—importantly distinctive in its affective charge.

My reader will soon notice that my treatment of so-called conceptual art is different than that usually offered by art historians. In fact, many readers will not recognize some of the work under study as conceptualist. Others may wonder why I have framed such a study between years that could be said to pre- and post-date conceptualism, even if I would concur with the art historical common sense that has fixed conceptualism’s emergence as an identifiable movement and a discursive formation to the year 1966.⁸ Rather than come at my subject by way of artists and artworks routinely classified as conceptual, I have instead foregrounded in order to examine and trace historically a range of aesthetic strategies and figures that are most often associated with conceptualism. These include systems and structures, language and information, and the scientistic and seemingly disaffected mode of rendering the visual field and, more generally, of managing experience. Indeed, these are the aspects by which we have come to recognize what we most commonly call conceptualism. Some of the work examined here is decidedly conceptualist (e.g., much of the Information show [1970], the subject of chapter 1, and Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document [1973–79], the focus of chapter 4); still other artworks under study could be said to anticipate conceptualism (e.g., Robert Morris’s proto-conceptualism of the early 1960s, considered in chapter 2), come after it (e.g., Morris’s first and second series of Blind Time drawings [1973 and 1976], also in chapter 2), or wryly resist its ways (e.g., Robert Smithson’s intervention of the late 1960s and early 1970s, examined in chapter 3). In chapter 3, my treatment of Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay, Sculpture in the Expanded Field, considers the art historian’s structuralist turn, signaled by that 1979 essay, as conceptualist in its rhetoric. In effect, my case studies could be said to approach conceptualism from all sides: in anticipation of it and in its aftermath; as we have been captivated by its rhetorics as well as defended against them. Taken together, the art and art historical work under study here reveal that these strategies and figures have had both aesthetic and theoretical lives, that these lives were quite active in the United States by the late 1960s, and that the terms conceptualism and structuralism best describe these lives—even if one might also see my subjects in the light of other terms like minimalism, neo-Dadaism, poststructuralism, even postmodernism. In sum, each time I deploy the term conceptualism or conceptual in this book, I mean to signal these nuances ultimately in an effort to recalibrate the intellectual-historical optic under which we interpret the meaning of these far-reaching aesthetic forms—even further reaching, that is, than our ordinary understanding of conceptual art has allowed us to see.

It has been over twenty years since Benjamin Buchloh described conceptual art as an art practice emphasizing its parallels, if not identity, with the systems of linguistic signs, and linked its practice with what he called the aesthetic of administration and the critique of institutions.⁹ Likewise, at least since 1966, the artistic practice of institutional critique and the scholarship that grew up alongside it have insisted upon a belief in and suspicion about the systematic control and oppression that institutional structures—being, as they are, like a language—consistently perform.¹⁰ But the fact that not just conceptualism but also structuralism came hitched to these terms— language and systems—has remained an inadequately examined fact. For, just like conceptual artists, structuralist theorists—Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the most memorable names among them—looked to systems and language for a revolution in signifying structures. Maintaining that human endeavors were inescapably governed by the structural order of the grid (a motif also repeatedly put to work by conceptual artists), structuralists argued that all social and cultural phenomena could be mastered through a science of the signifier. And it was by way of this claim that structuralism marked, once and for all, the end of the humanist understanding of the subject as in command of not only himself and a consciousness fully transparent to itself, but also the historical process. Perhaps most importantly, structuralism produced and made urgent the problem of the belatedness of subjectivity: the notion that the human subject is a mere effect of preexisting systems. Indeed, the most lasting of structuralist claims is that the condition of being-after determines the subject in both a liberatory and a plaguing way, for belatedness is always built into structuralist totality at the moment of its articulation.

While the