Give us our daily meaning
Big questions
We take it for granted that conceptual art opens up a new world of meaning. From the early 1990s onward, for some reason conceptual art became the thing. The artworld became fascinated by conceptualism’s original 1960s/early-’70s moment, and ever since then we’ve had constant survey shows of the first wave and all sorts of influences. The artists used to be funny princes and princesses, spoiled brats throwing structured tantrums and calling it art, being excited about civil rights, wanting to end war but keeping a boundary pretty much intact between the allure of the hip and contempt for straights. That’s the core material: rebellious videos, abrasive happenings, and societal-breakdown encouragement. But then you get the new thing, which is that the original, inevitably fleeting nature of the event or happening, which was perhaps not really worth holding on to, is held on to like mad.
Robert De Niro
I had these thoughts partly because of an old movie. Hollywood is usually clumsy about art, but one exception is an underrated early film by Brian de Palma called Hi, Mom! (1970), which satirizes radical chic. Robert De Niro plays an ordinary guy who wants to get into the movies and somehow, because of the cultural climate, becomes an urban guerrilla instead. The title is from the last words of the movie. A TV news crew interviews him about modern violence. He spouts ideological stuff but then turns to the camera and calls out, "Hi, Mom!" It turns out that adolescent attention seeking is basically what he’s been blowing up buildings and murdering for.
A large part of Hi, Mom! is devoted to a mock staging of a radical art happening, called "Be Black, Baby!" We see a lot of outrageous violence, including a near rape inflicted on an audience of white honkies by a performance group that appears to be part Living Theater, part Black Panthers. (The honkies, who’ve been forced to wear comic blackface makeup, love the experience.) The movie is silly but also real seeming in that it genuinely captures the emotional texture of the hot art scene of those times, Conceptual art’s mixture of the solemn and the ridiculous, the deeply felt but also the deeply felt for rather a short time (and the utterly engaged politically but only as a prelude to utter egotistical self-indulgence).
Revere ropey stuff
What defines Conceptual art (and its fallout movements and lead-up ones) is concentration on meaning. Even historic Minimalism, which doesn’t have any obvious meanings, is believed to have them anyway. Who cares what they are. Something to do with perception, the body, behavior, etc., etc. — subjects that sound like someone somewhere wrote something about them at some time. So the minimal look now has a meaning just by looking like Minimalism. In Conceptual art’s case, the meanings are always there, but it’s never clear why they should be taken seriously or thought about at all after 30 seconds.
Robert Smithson
These meanings signify more to people now than the aesthetic meanings of great paintings. Weightless, fugitive meaning suits us better than the mighty Ten Commandments type, but we still feel rather religious about the situation. The meanings of Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth seem to blow in the wind, as do the meanings of Robert Smithson and Dan Graham. But we condition ourselves not to laugh or at least not to laugh dismissively. Dan Graham’s writings: What are they? (Everyone knows it’s against the law to fail to revere them.) Kind of diverting: pedantic lists, descriptions, funny little pseudosociological studies, thoughts about rock music and society. Small-time, but we can never say so. Robert Smithson’s commentaries and essays: mildly amusing, with an ironic tone, a bit contemptuous of established figures, bringing art together with popular science. And that film Dan Graham made where he’s standing in front of a mirror and there’s an audience, and it’s some kind of performance. Maybe it’s a two-way mirror. In any case, what are we seeing? The new Las Meninas, different details but the same utter impact, at least according to orthodox interpretation. We can never question it. And Smithson’s Spiral Jetty: we can never hear the end of it, this throwaway event (interesting raw content, banal ultimate form) done for a lark, for the moment, not for the ages, a joke on primitive totemic intensity, which we now have to worship like a pharaoh entombed in a pyramid.
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