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.
Mad stuff
I watched a DVD of Hi, Mom! the other day while staying at a friend’s house in San Francisco. That morning, I’d been to the SF MoMA and seen two shows, each devoted to conceptual art: one hard-core, the other a selection of new acquisitions, which (because of universal acquisition patterns) tended to be conceptual art oriented. "The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now" featured anything artistic that the public had to get literally involved in: it might be Valie Export’s 1968 Tap and Touch Cinema event (out on the street, men feel her breasts through a strap-on box; the resulting video has subtitles of Theory talk), or it might be some living artworks by Erwin Wurm (San Franciscans get on a white plinth for a minute and balance some oranges and brooms, and it’s a sculpture). The acquisitions exhibition, "Passageworks," would have passed quickly out of my mind if it weren’t for the inclusion of an installation from 2000 by French artist Pierre Huyghe.
Al Pacino
Huyghe’s work — entitled The Third Memory — really entertained me. I usually can’t care less about photos and texts arranged in grids, or videos, but there was a lot of weird human interest here. The work is about John Wojtowicz, who held up a bank in Brooklyn in 1972 and whose story was the basis for the script of Sidney Lumet’s 1975 movie Dog Day Afternoon. It’s just a collection of documents and films. But they all happen to be riveting, and one of them Huyghe actually made himself: a reenactment of certain scenes from the real robbery. For example, at one point you might be seeing, on one side of a split screen, a very stout, very white-haired Brooklyn-accented oldster performing: that’s actually Wojtowicz, who’s been out of prison for several years now. In a sleazy modern French TV studio, he’s ordering low-rate actors playing bank staff to put their hands up. At the same time, on the other half of the screen, a young Al Pacino orders highly experienced Hollywood actors playing bank staff to do the same thing.
The title The Third Memory refers to the supposed creation made from two different types of memory — those that are real on the one hand (the robber’s own subjective sense of what happened to him) and fictional on the other (the movie’s construction of events). The result is a third type of memory: cultural-mythic (all of us, kind of — all our heads now accommodating this rich myth of lowlife goings-on in early-’70s New York). Along with the film, there were framed news photos of Wojtowicz telling off the cops outside the bank and being arrested. He looked thin and handsome — in fact, uncannily like the young Al Pacino.
There were also news photos of Wojtowicz’s real male wife, looking strikingly pretty, like his impersonator in the movie, Chris Sarandon (first husband of Susan), and Wojtowicz’s female wife, looking pretty fat, like the fat actress who played her (if you haven’t seen the film, one of the twists in it is that the hero has two wives: one male, from those days’ version of a civil ceremony, and one female). We are also treated to the whole of an episode of a 1978 Jeanne Parr TV show, where Parr interviews Wojtowicz in prison. He is chubby and plain, in sharp contrast to his haunted good looks a few years previously. (He tells Parr: "If you’re a man, you take responsibility for your actions.") Parr also interviews Wojtowicz’s male wife, who’s now become a woman and makes a living as a prostitute. (Q: "Do they know you used to be a man?" A: "No!")
I didn’t learn anything or feel different about anything, but I found everyone’s changing appearance and their accounts of their desperate actions compelling and moving. I have two angles on this work. It doesn’t make anyone "think" in the way that In Cold Blood or even Dog Day Afternoon does. Sidney Lumet’s film is fabulously rich in emotion, full of tenderness, violence, love, tears, loss — and all this is imbued in the very texture of the film. While Huyghe’s artwork is as numb and blank as any bit of conceptual art always is, just because of the deliberate limitations of the form. And I’m slightly depressed by the exploitation by an excruciating French relational aesthetics man-boy (you can see Huyghe being interviewed on YouTube) of a sad real guy and his loser life story. Hollywood certainly exploited him too: Lumet’s movie distorted his experience, and he was paid very little. Pierre Huyghe allows him to say what he wants, and yet where the movie has genuine richness and impact on every level, Huyghe’s installation is shallow: all it does is line up untransformed documentary content: newspaper photos, headlines, TV shows, plus short bursts of the movie. The split-screen film that Huyghe made himself is far too desultory to ever require another viewing (desultoriness being deliberately built-in for pious or intellectual reasons is still desultory). But I can honestly say that I was drawn in.
Sad ending
It’s possible to make fun of the limitations and absurdities of conceptual art, but one has to admit that the problems it deals with are real. They are about present-day life and how art can hope to process it. The art of the past is great. We want to stare. There’s nothing so powerful as a little Bonnard of a lady having a wash. Or a Matisse of some purple trees. Or a 1950s abstract painting of a void. Gorky, Still, Rothko, Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard — I loved the paintings in SF MoMA’s permanent collection. But what that stuff doesn’t have is contemporaneity. It can’t answer our need for a type of art that reflects our own everyday experience. We want art to be alert to change, tuned in to how we live now. The whole conceptual tradition, including Pierre Huyghe, offers exactly that. It’s not that Matisse and Gorky, etc., can tell us only about 1917 or 1939. They offer magnificent lookatability, not just beauty but beauty full of mind and feeling — emotion that transcends its own moment. But we are frankly baffled by the tradition of aestheticism that Matisse represents. At least, we can only appreciate it from a distance. We can’t join in. We can’t do it anymore. Society just isn’t set up in the same way. In terms of immediate everydayness, such heights of art have become meaningless. Conceptual art hits the spot instead. (There’s something sad about it. It’s about new freedom, but it’s also basically about giving credence to impotence.) We have this itch for the present that conceptual art answers. It doesn’t have anything worth looking at. Plus its "think-about-it" content isn’t worth thinking about for long. So there’s a loss along with the gain. But that’s the way it is.
Matthew Collings is Modern Painters’ London-based contributing editor.
"The Conceptual Art Father" originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' March 2009 Table of Contents.
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