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the dematerialization of art

lucy r. lippard and john chandler

During the 1960's, the anti-intellectual, emotional/intuitive processes of art-making character­

istic of the last two decades have begun to give way to an ultra-conceptual art that emphasizes

the thinking process almost exclusively. As more and more work is designed in the studio but

executed elsewhere by professional craftsmen, as the object becomes merely the end product,

a number of artists are losing interest in the physical evolution of the work of art. The studio

is again becoming a study. Such a trend appears to be provoking a profound dematerialization

of art, especially of art as object, and if it continues to prevail, it may result in the object's

becoming wholly obsolete. ( ...)

A highly conceptual art, like an extremely rejective art or an apparently random art,

upsets detractors because there is "not enough to look at," or rather not enough of what they

are accustomed to lookingjor. Monotonal or extremely simple-looking painting and totally

"dumb" exist in time as well as in space because of two aspects of the

ence. they demand more participation by the despite their apparent hostility

(which is not hostility so much as aloofness and self-containment). More time must be spent

in experience of a detail-less work, for the viewer is used to focusing on details and absorbing

an impression of the piece with the help of these details. Secondly, the time spent looking at

or one with a minimum seems UUu.U,",'-'.lJ than action-and- n i:­ '<

detail-filled time. This time element is, of course, psychological, but it allows the artist an :" an

..,.., alternative to or extension of the serial method. Painter-sculptor Michael Snow's film 'l-Vttve­ OJ

Q. length, for instance, is tortuously extended within its 45-minute span. By the time the

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camera, zeroing in very slowly from the back of a large loft, reaches a series of windows and ::r :::I ... ..::r finally a photograph of water surface, or waves, between two of them, and by the time that :::I co. n;

photograph gradually fills the screen, the viewer is aware of an almost :orthat seems the result of an equally unbearable length of time stretched out at a less than normal -co Q.

rate of looking; the intensity is reinforced the sound, which during most of the film is '" 3 ;!!.

monotonal, moving up in pitch and up in volume until at the end it is a shrill hum, both ~ 0;'

exciting and painful. N ;!!. o ::l

a minor American Cubist who wrote, over a twenty-five year period, an ~ '"

often extraordinary book called The Mathematical Basis ofthe Am, divided the historical evolu­ ­ tion of art into five "wnes," which replace each other with increasing acceleration: 1. pre­

aesthetic, a biological stage of mimicry; 2. traditional-aesthetic, a magic, ritual-religious art;

3. emotional-aesthetic, artistic expressions of emotions, self-expression, art for art's sake;

4. rational-aesthetic, characterized by empiricism, experimental art, novel art; 5. scientific,

post-aesthetic, which will make possible the manufacture, distribution and consumption of a

perfect art product and will be characterized a fusion of the art forms and materials,

finally, a "disintegration of art," the "abstraction and liberation of the idea."

Given this framework, we could now be in a transitional period between the last two

phases, though one can hardly conceive of them as literally the last phases the visual arts will

go through. After the intuitive process of recreating aesthetic realities through man's own body,

the process of reproduction or mathematical logic enters into art. (The Bauhaus

"Less is More" was anticipated William of Occam when he wrote: "What can be

explained by fewer principles is explained needlessly by more"; Nominalism and Minimalism

have more in common than alliteration.) From then on, man became increasingly conscious

of the course of his evolution, beginning to create directly from principles without the interces­

sion of reproductive reality. This clearly corresponds to the Greenbergian interpretation of

before Greenberg, though his disciples insist on attributing it

to The supersedes this self-conscious, self-critical art that

answers other art according to a determinist schedule. Involved with opening up rather than .j:> '-Inarrowing down, the newer work offers a curious kind of Utopianism which should not be

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confused with Nihilism except in that, like all Utopias, it indirectly advocates a tabula rasa;co "" like most Utopias, it has no concrete expression.

Dematerialized art is post-aesthetic only in its increasingly non-visual emphases. The

aesthetic of principle is still an aesthetic, as implied by frequent statements by mathematicians

and scientists about the beauty of an equation, formula or solution: "Why should an aesthetic

criterion be so successful so often? Is it just that it satisfies physicists? I think there is only one

answer-nature is inherently beautiful" (physicist Murray Cell-Mann); "In this case, there was

a moment when I knew how nature worked. It had elegance and beauty. The goddam thing

was gleaming" (Nobel prizewinner Richard Feynman).2 The more one reads these statements,

the more apparent it becomes that the scientist's attempt to discover, perhaps even to impose

order and structure on the universe, rests on assumptions that are essentially aesthetic. Order

itself, and its implied simplicity and unity, are aesthetic criteria.

The disintegration Schillinger predicted is obviously implicit in the break-up since 1958

or so of traditional media, and in the introduction of electronics, light, sound, and, more

important, performance attitudes into painting and sculpture-the so far unrealized interme­

dia revolution whose prophet is John Cage. It is also implied by the current international obses­

sion with entropy. According to Wylie Sypher, for example: "The future is that in which time

becomes effective, and the mark of time is the increasing disorder toward which our system

tends.... During the course of time, entropy increases. Time can be measured by the loss of

structure in our system, its tendency to sink back into that original chaos from which it may

have emerged .... One meaning of time is a drift toward inertia." 3

Today many artists are interested in an order that incorporates implications of disorder

and chance, in a negation of actively ordering parts in favor of the presentation of a whole. 4

Earlier in the 20th century the announcement of an element of indeterminacy and relativity

in the scientific system was a factor in the rise of an irrational abstraction. Plato's anti-art

statements, his opposition to imitative and representational art, and his contempt for the prod­

ucts of artists, whom he considered insane, are too familiar to review here, but they are interest­

ing to note again in view of the current trend back to "normalcy," as evidenced by the

provocative opening show of the East Village coopera~ive Lannis Museum of Normal Art,

where several of the works discussed here were seen. Actually, the "museum" would be better

called the Museum ofAdnormal Art, since it pays unobtrusive homage to the late Ad Reinhardt

and to his insistence that only "art-as-art" is normal for art. (The painter-director, Joseph Ko­

suth, admits his pedantic tendency, also relatable to Reinhardt's dogmas, in the pun on normal

schools.) However, "no idea" was one of Reinhardt's Rules and his ideal did not include the

I:ultra-conceptual. When works of art, like words, are signs that convey ideas, they are not things (')

:'in themselves but symbols or representatives of things. Such a work is a medium rather than '<

'C..an end in itself or "art-as-art." The medium need not be the message, and some ultra­ 'C a.

conceptual art seems to declare that the conventional art media are no longer adequate as o·

media to be messages in themselves. ( ...) :::T (')"

Idea art has been seen as art about criticism rather than art-as-art or even art about art. ..:::T c. " c;;On the contrary, the dematerialization of the object might eventually lead to the disintegration

of criticism as it is known today. The pedantic or didactic or dogmatic basis insisted on by :::T (1)

(1)many of these artists is incorporated in the art. It bypasses criticism as such. Judgment of ideas Cl.

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is less interesting than following the ideas through. In the process, one might discover that '" (1)

something is either a good idea, that is, fertile and open enough to suggest infinite possibilities, N

~ or a mediocre idea, that is, exhaustible, or a bad idea, that is, already exhausted or with so little o

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substance that it can be taken no further. (The same can be applied to style in the formal sense, '" ~

and style except as an individual trademark tends to disappear in the path of novelty.) If the

object becomes obsolete, objective distance becomes obsolete. Sometime in the near future it

may be necessary for the writer to be an artist as well as for the artist to be a writer. There will

still be scholars and historians of art, but the contemporary critic may have to choose between

a creative originality and explanatory historicism.

Ultra-conceptual art will be thought of by some as "formalist" because of the spareness

and austerity it shares with the best of painting and sculpture at the moment. Actually, it is as

anti-formal as the most amorphous or journalistic expressionism. It represents a suspension of

realism, even formal realism, color realism, and all the other "new realisms." However, the idea

that art can be experienced in order to extract an idea or underlying intellectual scheme as well

as to perceive its formal essence continues from the opposing formalist premise that painting

and sculpture should be looked at as objects per se rather than as references to other images and

representation. As visual art, a highly conceptual work still stands or falls by what it looks like,

but the primary, rejective trends in their emphasis on singleness and autonomy have limited

the amount of information given, and therefore the amount of formal analysis possible. They

have set critic and viewer thinking about what they see rather than simply weighing the formal

or emotive impact. Intellectual and aesthetic pleasure can merge in this experience when the

work is both visually strong and theoretically complex.

Some thirty years ago, Ortega wrote about the "new art": "The task it sets itself is enor­

mous; it wants to create from nought. Later, I expect, it will be content with less and achieve

more."5 Fully aware of the difficulty of the new art, he would probably not have been surprised "" ID

(J1 to find that a generation or more later the artist has achieved more with less, has continued to Q

something of "nought" fifty years after Malevich's White on White seemed to have defined

can be. Has an nought for once and for all. We still do not know how much less

ultimate zero point been arrived at with black paintings, white paintings, light beams, transpar­

ent film, silent concerts, invisible sculpture, or any of the other projects mentioned above? It

hardly seems

NOTES The Mathematical Basis of the Arts (New York: Philosophical 1. Joseph

1948), p. 17.

2. Quoted in Lee Edson, "Two Men in Search of the Quark," New York Times Magazine (8 Octo­

ber 1967).

3. Wylie Sypher, Loss of Self in Modern Literature and Art (New York: Vintage, 1962), pp. 73­

74. The word has also been applied to dif,feri ng areas of recent art by Robert Smithson and Piero

Gilardi; it appears as the title of short stories as well, for instance, by Thomas Pynchon.

4. In the New York art world, the idea seems to have originated with Don Judd.

5. Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), p. 50.

This essay was written in late 1967 and first published in Art International, 12:2 (February

1968), pp. 31-36.