by Johanna Drucker

Conceptual artists made such extensive use of language in the 1960s that the term “text art” was one of the rubrics under which their work was identified. But the works of that early period would not have been called “conceptual writing,” perhaps in part because they got their public exposure mainly in fine arts galleries and museum settings. Institutional frameworks are only part of what sets early conceptual works apart from the strain of conceptualisms to which the Notes in this book pertain. Nearly half a century of innovation intervenes, and with it, a degree of critical self-consciousness that eschews the blunt orthodoxy of first generation conceptual art with its “self-described and self defined” earnest engagement with an “idea as the machine that makes art.”

The first phrase in that last sentence is Joseph Kosuth’s, the second, Sol Lewitt’s, both artists whose work features prominently in the history of conceptual art and its critical formulations. Both were articulate writers, and Kosuth’s “Art After Philosophy,” like Lewitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” are canonical texts that helped establish the basic tenets on which “idea art” functioned. Put simply, the crux of conceptualism was that ideas constituted works of art, independent of their execution or instantiation in material. The affront to expressionism and modern formalism was clear. By banishing lyrical subjectivity and existential angst at the same time as they clobbered the painterliness of paint and other allegiances to media and material specificity, conceptual artists pushed contemporary art into an intellectual frame. Few moves have had such profound consequences. The conceptual turn is the defining act of late 20th century art, and in a serious sense, all art executed subsequently has to reckon with attention to the idea at its core, no matter how elaborately executed it is.

But what of conceptual writing now and its relation to past practices? Why invoke this earlier movement and call forth its associations to conjure theoretical constructs from a broad reference field to compose “notes on conceptualisms?” Self-conscious and highly focused attention to the ideational basis of aesthetic work is one part of the conceptual equation. The other is an investment in proceduralism—making works of art according to a set of instructions. Precedents for conceptual writing include Raymond Roussel’s novels, the writings of OuLiPo figures, Georges Perec and Harry Mathews, John Cage’s compositions, and Jackson MacLow’s gothas. Text works by conceptual artists—Carl Andre’s typewriter pieces, Madeline Gin’s Word Rain, and Robert Smithson’s Heap of Language—are among the well-known works from the visual field. Much conceptual writing is produced under constraints or according to certain systematic principles. But even as I write these phrases, I feel the inadequacy of such straightforward statements to address the shifting ground Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman are trying to lay out. Current conceptualisms cannot be framed simply by putting them in relation to that early tradition.

In their “Foreword,” Place and Fitterman trace the origins of Notes to a discussion about a bunch of different written works that had been composed by erasure. Should every work produced using this strategy (is it a strategy? a technique? a method?) count as conceptual writing? Or would differentiating them from each other expose some principles that make one such act of reworking different from another within the horizon of conceptual writing? Twenty pages later, they invoke a founding example, Robert Rauschenberg’s 1953 “erased de Kooning drawing.” Contrasting it with Marcel Duchamp’s détournement-avant-la-lettre, the “Rembrandt as Ironing Board” proposal, they put the Rauschenberg work in alignment with Jen Bervin’s Nets (poems “that perform erasure on Shakespeare’s sonnets”), while relegating Duchamp’s irreverent Dada gesture to a different order of aesthetic approaches. They are right to cite Rauschenberg’s act, a performance as much as it is a piece, an emblematic work. The erased drawing was meant to produce a present trace of a marked absence, a ghostly palimpsestic base for work that could only be made by presencing precedence. Dada’s nihilistic flippancies were disrespectful dismissals of tradition while conceptualism’s negations, they suggest, are generative, referential, and essential for establishing a ground on which new conceptualisms take place.

Rauschenberg’s erasure is one piece of a three-part opening gambit of which his “white” paintings (blank canvases covered with house paint that John Cage called “airports of the lights, shadows, and particles”) and “black” paintings (newspaper layered onto canvas with black paint) are the other two gestures. By clearing space, creating frames to call attention to the aesthetic co-efficient of incidental experience, and rendering the field fully replete, Rauschenberg created works that sprang directly from his engagement with Black Mountain poets and artists. He called these experiences, not paintings or art objects, but circumstantial and provocative spaces for events.

Though the phrase “conceptual art” did not appear until the next decade, Rauschenberg’s explicit break with expressionist romanticism was one among several harbingers of changes to come. The radical shift in approach to composition that linked Charles Olson and Robert Creeley to Cage and Merce Cunningham and others at Black Mountain, found expression in that early Rauschenberg work. Proceduralism, not under that name, and an approach to production grounded in ideas, rather than formal or lyrical means, was in ascendance. But if that is all true, and if the various modes of conceptualism and performance art, minimalism, fluxus work, and other approaches to artistic activity that devalued traditional and romantic authorship all gathered momentum and flourished from the 1960s onward, then why are Place and Fitterman invoking this rubric as a way to address contemporary writing? Is it really harder to write or make art in an innovative vein now than it was when Rauschenberg was clearing space by erasing one of the grand masters of the prior generation? Why not just repeat the regular cycle of rejection and renewal?

The answer is everywhere in Place and Fitterman’s tightly organized text. A pastiche and accumulation of thoughts and citations, references and pointers to an open field of associated works and ideas, Notes on Conceptualisms is symptomatic of the current state of experimental writing. The conceptualism of its title has many resonances, and the problems it poses cannot be addressed through a simple single linear notion of historical cycles and sequences. History has tilted onto a plane, become a topos, a spatial field, not a line, and figuring one’s work against such a jealous ground is not the same as playing games of oedipal displacement under the anxiety of influence.

A number of key concepts organize the arguments in this text. Though not all are sketched in binary opposition, each gets some of its identity by contrast to other received notions that separate their current conceptualisms from earlier avant-gardes or experimental writing practices. Allegory is put into contrast with symbol, composition with representation, desiring sobject with authoring agent.

Interestingly, allegory had no place in conceptual art or writing in the 1960s or 1970s, but is recycled from its appearance in Walter Benjamin’s critical writings in the 1930s. Allegory had a front stage role in art critical texts of the 1980s when Craig Owens and others used it as a defining characteristic of postmodern art. (Pop, minimalism, and conceptualism, though clearly turns away from modernism, are not considered post-modern—in part because they appeared before the term was in widespread use.) The critical discourse that arose with the “Pictures” generation (so called because of their association with the title of the milestone 1979 exhibition) used allegory as an overarching rubric for the acts of appropriation, re-photography, and re-mediating acts of display that were part of its radical dialogue with traditional fine art and new engagements with mass media. Roland Barthes’ original rethinking of ideas of authorship had been chronologically coincidental with early conceptualism and proceduralism. But his critical work, as well as Benjamin’s, got a second wind with the “anti-aesthetics” of the 1980s. Conceptual writing within the sphere of Language Poetry drew from many of the same intellectual impulses, though the attachment to ideas of resistance through difficulty harkened back to Russian formalist and surrealist antecedents. That kind of nostalgia is completely banished in the work of new conceptual writing, and Place and Fitterman’s use of allegory is one of the signs that they have leapfrogged over LangPo and into a present tense.

They embrace allegory as a powerful force: “Allegory breaks mimesis via its constellatory features” (p.23). Thus allegory emphasizes a constitutive and associational field that builds, accretes, superimposes, accumulates rather than standing in for something else. In other words, the made-ness of the text occurs entirely on a plane of immanence, one that precludes any notion of transcendence. And it is made-ness that is radically and radially associative rather than referential. Surface, not depth, and displacement, not condensation, are its features and modes. They sketch their centrifugal model of allegory with a compact diagram (an upper-case “A” with arrows pointing outward), contrasted with symbol (an “S” at the center of arrows pointing inward in a strikingly forceful, and quite legible, rhetorical gesture). These acts of displacement are lines of syntagmatic association through which signification functions along lines of presence(s).

Their notion of the sobject, in spite of the painful neologism, contains a compelling argument against the old Cartesian split that governs not only philosophy and creativity but theories of alienation and labor in a Marxist frame. By eradicating the fundamental duality on which self is objectified and also kept distinct from practice, the term aligns with ideas of co-dependence that are part of a constructivist approach to cognition. The embedded-ness of self and system this implies are more dynamic than structuralist or post-structuralist concepts of the self as “a subject constituted across signs” (another commonplace of 1980s theory). Nor is the sobject entirely voided of affect, even if expressiveness and its indexical relation to any interior life are moot in this critical discussion. The possibilities of a desiring subject for its own self-realization, expression, creation are negated, pre-co-opted from before conception­. Known reference points hamstring and hobble any creative impulse towards expansion or extension. We are, it seems, hopeless and inevitably subject to the limitations imposed by conditions that keep us engaged with the plane of immanence. So be it. The results may be a dark Shandy-esque turning and returning to false starts and endless dérive-like detours and détournements, but the outpouring of current writing is unlikely to be staunched by the knowledge-in-advance of the impossibility of any writing going on in a representational mode. A richly constituted surface network of associations and references create the field of a conceptual text, but the constraint at work keeps all relations immanent, eschewing not only transcendence, but representation, as if the vertical access of belief had been eliminated in favor of an extensive horizontal plateau. This corresponds to my notion of an “immanent sublime” that is not based on transcendence, but on the situatedness of experience within the messiness of the world. Those familiar with the Romantic ideology, to borrow Jerome McGann’s phrase, will recognize this as its other tradition—not Wordsworth’s, but Byron’s and Baudelaire’s.

Rather than taking “literariness” as its ground, contemporary writing eschews the poetics of symbolic figuration, compression, and device, that were the core of modernist experiment, and addresses itself to the field of conceptual thought as its foundation, by taking “thinkerliness” as the conceptual basis for writing. Conceptualism produces devaluation—transferring the debasement of commodified objects into a similar practice for works of writing that no longer exist to be read, but just thought about. In this regard, Notes is emphatically focused on a demonstration of methods of composition after philosophy. The double reference of the last phrase is deliberate, invoking Joseph Kosuth’s crucial contribution in Conceptual Art as well as Edgar Allen Poe’s seminal text—for the “after”ness of this mood of this book is striking and poignant. Its tone is redolent with associations and reference points, awareness of its historical position. Not only has everything already been done, but even that already-been-done-ness is over. Throughout my reading, I heard Samuel Beckett’s refrain, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” echoing through my head.

That isolated units of prose in this book structure a textual field is as indicative of the state of contemporary prose as any specific statements they embody. They are hinged and tangential, oblique, not tending towards a referent, but constituting a field of relations. The writing is not making an argument according to conventions, but performing a set of moves to constitute a presentation of criticism under constraint. Place and Fitterman have deftly sketched a framework to get some purchase on a general theory of conceptualisms.

© Johanna Drucker. All rights reserved.