The Concept of Conceptual Art:
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conceptualizations and the values that we should promote. This is not to say that
art needs to be subservient to politics or ethics. This is not a prescription for
Propaganda. Rather it is to realize that the very act of conceptualizing, and the
very act of making art, is always already soaked through with moral decisionmaking.
Conceptual art, then, is not different ffom any other type of art in an
ontological way. Something is lost if we do not see Duchamp’s urinal, do not get
to Stare at Rauschenberg’s erasure, and do not walk through some lesser artist’s
installations. Simply to read or hear about these things is to be in the presence of
them—and to be able to perform the concepts they are bringing to the fore—but
it is to presence them in an absent way. All concepts, when not fleshed out fully,
when not lived and explored and performed, are ethereal and ghostly, absently
intended even while they are directly before us.
And if the artist’s intention seems more important in conceptual art
than other forms of art, this is just a reminder that conceptual art should be
showing us that the opposite is always true. To think we understand an erasure if
we know the famous sketch that has been erased is to think, falsely, that our
only access to that sketch is outside what is given, outside in some narrative that
the author or a commentator might teil us in order to let us in on the secret. This
simply is not the case. First, because what is erased is still there on the page; the
traces of its absence still reverberating and present for us to see. To be attuned to
that absence, even to project our own erased pencil strokes, is the performance
that rewards us. And second, because what is told to us directly by the artist is
always just as suspect—and just as trustworthy—as what we can see for
ourselves, even in conceptual art. Who is to say, really, that the most important
point of Rauschenberg’s erasure is what, specifically, has been erased? The
background description and the Statement of the author’s intention are
interesting, but they are not the work of art in full. Something is missing if we
search them out singly and think we have found the world.
Furthermore, should I encounter a few centimeters of a brass rod
sticking out of the ground while walking through a forest, even if I do not know
that there is a full kilometer more buried straight below me, I need to be
intrigued and amazed and overcome by the beauty of it all in the same way that I
need to leam to see and feel the endless rhizomes connecting the forest life, the
arterial roots of trees branching out for miles around me as they search for water
and comingle their damp fingery tendrils, the web of life and nonlife that is
always underfoot supporting me and lifting me up and asking to be seen in all of
its unseen glory when all that might be visible is just the tip of it all.
Metaphysics, and the scientific worldview in which the world is reduced to data
and only that which can be presently present, presently measured, presently
controlled and fully known can appear, blinds us. But to miss the hidden
kilometer that is always there in all art and in the world around us would be to
miss the aesthetic altogether. To miss all of this would be to miss the point. To