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idea of an isolated American painting, so popular in this country during the thirties, absurd to me, just as the idea of creating a purely American mathematics or physics

seem absurd . .. And in another sense, the problem doesn't exist at all; or if it did, would itself.' An American is an American and his painting would naturally be qualified by that whether he wills it or not. But the basic problems of contemporary painting are ~dependent of anyone country."

Jackson Pollock

totally uninterested in European art and I think it's over with." Donald Judd

(arte) facts of recent history rush backwards in time, perpetually receding from apperception and apprehension; their actuality (their qualities as 'acts'

in a context of historical reality) and their effectiveness (the effects on those works depended as well as those they created in their particular

of production) are diminishing their impact, dissolving up to the point of It is at precisely this point that the historian steps in. After having neither

Jticipated in the acts nor caused any effects,' after having taken neither risk nor lity, he contributes to history by elevating works of art to the status of

objects and saves them from oblivion by transforming their historical into formal quality. In his perspective the works become magnified

Bereft of all contextual implications, they now tend to appear as ronomous subjects (and objects) speaking (and being spoken about) in their

discourse, following their own rules of grammar and having a history of their , an independent metalanguage and metahistory, so to speak. This language,

clearly the language of a secondary mythical reality, has to be read with the tool of ideological criticism1. Yet as works of art can never be restored to

original level of primary functional language, the historical method of criticism is capable only of revealing their original impact in an indirect

r. As their transformation into cultural myth is analyzed, their original reality becomes apparent.

On the other hand, a formalist approach to art of the recent past would allow us about a urinal manufactured around 1917 in terms of the wholeness of its Gestalt,

; specificity of its material, its sculptural presence. It allows us to see the relative , of ponock's paintings, their definitive abolition of the cubist grid as their highest

As a result we learn about a new notion of identity between form and shape in to Stella's work or about the objective quality of Judd's painterly sculpture which and defines itself and which commands its own space. The formalist approach

us-perhaps even out of respect for the original historical and existential under which a work has been produced-to deal with a work in an objective

, considering only the facts seemingly at hand in form.

Formalization of historical and critical description seems to have found fE.->edback in the production of American art of the sixties. The terms which had been used to describe the phenomena became the terms used to produce the phenomena. This hermeneutic circle-which has its equivalents in other disciplines (e.g. the debate on positivism in sociology between Karl Popper and TW. Adomo)-seems to have found its post-minimal high point in the visual arts in an aphorism as defined by Joseph Kosuth in 1969.

"Works of art that try to tell us something about the world are bound to fail .... The absence of reality in art is exactly art's reality."2

This position which is, philosophically speaking, simply the introduction of a basic concept of logical positivism into aesthetical discussion and, art historically speaking, just another attempt in a long tradition of trying to conjure up the historical and physical materiality of the artwork by acting out narcissistic fantasies about the self-procreating artist, offers aesthetical relief by promising an escape from history. "From symbolism3 to Yves Klein's concept of immateriality until togay-it-basJound its most updated version in the well-designed tautological corpora of ePh KOSU~

The polar opposite of this position of formalism was articulated the very same year along the lines of a concept of dialectic historicity in Daniel Buren's text Limites Critiques, which ended as follows:

"Art whatever it may be is exclusively political. What is called for is the analysis of formal and cultural limits (and not one or the other) within which art exists and struggles. These limits are many and of different intensities. Although the prevailing ideology and the associated artists try in every way to camouflage them, and although it is too early-the conditions are not met-to blow them up, the time has come to unveil them."4

If there is anything like a prominent specific difference between recent American and European art, one might presume to find it by comparing their differe attitudes toward the ided of history_and the historiciiY of art Therefore the following essay-by no means pretending to show the only aspect of differentiation-focuses on how these notions and attitudes have changed in the work of Europeans and Americans since 1945. It discusses their interrelations and exchanges, the transformations that these notions have undergone on both sides, and finally asks: what are the problems that arise when artists understand their work as being beyond history and when the historian's critical fictions tend to become art?

Post war Lacunae "Art publications from France, and Cahiers d'Art above all, were another matter; these kept you posted on the latest developments in Paris, which wa~ the only place that really mattered. For a while Parisian painting exerted perhaps a more decisive influence on New York art through black and white reproductions than through first hand examples, which may have been a blessing in disguise, for it permitted some Americans to develop a more

83

independent sense of color, if ignorance. "5 Clement Greenberg

thanks to misunderstanding and

Immediate post-war history, namely that of the Paris and New York schools of painting, seems to have been formed as much by omissions and by ignorance of historical knowledge as by the especially rich wells of artistic information which existed at the time and which have since been handed down to us. Mondrian's presence, for example, seems to have made no impression on the new generation of artists either in Paris, where he had been virtually ignored over the period of almost twenty years which he spent there, or in New York, where he was only really discovered after abstract expressionism. Another example of how 'history' is made by omission is the almost complete lack of artistic reception of the Russian Constructivists, although Kandinsky became of incredible importance both in Paris and New York post-war painting. The same can be observed in looking at the history of artistic reception of Dada and Surrealism, which were assimilated only in their more traditional painterly forms as they appeared in the works of Mira and Masson, Max Ernst and Tanguy, whereas the artists, whose work in the light of our present evaluation of their epistemological radicalness and long range consequences, seem to have been completely ignored by the first generation of post-war artists. Why did Rothko and Newman, Still and Pollock, Gorky and de Kooning not choose Duchamp and Picabia, Man Ray and Tzara, Arp and Schwitters as sources of information at that time?6 It must have been due to the awe for the tradition of Parisian painting as it is expressed in Greenberg's The School of Paris: 1946':

"Paris remains the fountainhead of modern art, and every move made there is decisive for advanced art elsewhere-which is advanced precisely because it can respond to and extend the vibrations of that nerve center and nerve-end of modernity which is Paris."7

From our perspective this seems the more astonishing, as artists in Paris, to some extent, by then had become aware of the growing academicism of late surrealist painting. Jean Dubuffet, for example, tried to posit his Art Brut figurations against the surrealists' mythical attitude of the individual creator's proliferous subconscious by referring again-as the surrealists had done originally themselves-to the collective potentials and forms of creativity by substituting raw and repugnant materials like foils and sponges or sand for the precious and pompous surfaces of late surrealist painting. Or, as he put it in his own words in 1947:

"What I'm interested in is not the cakes but the bread. If one would be inclined in general to prefer bread to cake, one would end up being very injust to pastry chefs, and not only to pastry chefs, but also to the institutions, like museums and art dealers and critics, which are also a Parisian specialty, nourishing quite a lot of people ... I would like my paintings to be on the verge of disappearing as paintings. It's at the moment of vanishing that the swan starts singing ... "8

~

Of course one knows that it is irrelevant to review historical facts and question their facticity by referring to the arbitrary circumstances and coin,..;, by which they happened to become facts. And it is almost ludicrous to whether artefacts might have become different artefacts altogether under a different set of historical circumstances had more or different information absorbed at any specific point in history. Nevertheless it is a valid step to acknowledge the extent to which 'reception history' (and its very peculiar conditions) has become 'production history', and by proceeding according kind of approach to reveal the degree to which seemingly autonomous entities inform themselves historically. From today's European perspective questions about the historic aspect of some recent American art begin to Despite its unquestionable authenticity and innovative impact, in retrospect not affirm a cyclic pattern of history whereby each generation from fhe expressionists to the minimalists will appear as having assimilated, worked enlarged a different set of historical presuppositions of 20th century art? example, one could ask for the new epistemological radicality or the new Warhol Campbell Soup painting in comparison to Duchamp's urinal. Or Flavin's Diagonal of Personal Ecstasy (the diagonal of May 25, 1963, to Brancusi), which has certainly to be considered a key work in international American art of the sixties? From our point of view today is it not a very well assimilation of different sculptural concepts, comparable to the still undec complexity of Schwitters' architectural vision, his Cathedral of Erotic Misery?9

Post Surrealist Dilemma "The surrealists reacted against the historical conditions 'in the service revolution' by trying to accelerate and to increase the process of autodestruction of bourgeois consciousness by means of the su By Using the more or less misunderstood and limited methods of psychoanalysis, those artists totally withdrew from society back into themselves, i.e. the subconsctous became the last unit of the d they hoped that from there they could protest more convincingly by their 'ego' against the dissociated conditons. That this particular form was infantile did not prevent them from experiencing it as a real the contrary, it was precisely this infantilism which allowed them to protest to include everything and nothing, believing it to be unlimited. Max Raphael, Reading the new art, 193810

When looking at the history of post-surrealist art in Europe, painting of the School of Paris, it becomes even more of a necessity to history as the result of ignorance peculiar to local traditions or as a

. resistance to certain presuppositions. Even though Clement Greenberg's observation from 1946 is truthful to objective history, it neither coincides actual Parisian reality at the time nor with what developed out of it in the following:

"After 1920 the positivism of the School of Paris, which depended in part on the assumption that infinite prospects of technical advance lay ahead of both society and arts, lost faith in itself. It began to be suspected that the physical in art was as historically limited as capitalism itself had turned out to be. Mondrian looked like the handwriting on the waiL" 11

I reenberg, whose astounding clairvoyance seems to anticipate the more recent . materialization of the art object in conceptual and post-minimal art and which might be calJed the most original and authentic contribution of American

to the present,12 came obviously closer in his observations to the actual reality nding him ten years later (and one wonders whether he had to relinquish for

the uncompromising radicality of his original insight into historical truth) in

"It could be said that, by 1940, Eighth Street had caught up with Paris as Paris had not yet caught up with herself, and that a handful of then obscure New York painters possessed the ripest painting culture of the day."13

It is only against the background of a situation 'which had not caught up with (a deliberate or imposed historical ignorance and innocence), that one can

:mprehend certain European developments and estimations, over-estimations a certain type of artist as a specific socially and historically defined character thus the behavior of the key figures of post-war European art: Mathieu and in Paris, Fontana and Manzoni in Italy and finally Beuys in West-Germany. Raphael's remark on the surrealists' infantilism became even more true with artists, which finds its clearest manifestation in the fact that-with the

of Fontana-the work of these first-generation-artists is bound to the personality of its authors, with all its necessary differentiations of the

identities of course. This idea of the artist as mediumistic-transcendental is in distinct opposition to the more familiar and traditional image of the sCientist-philosopher-craftsman, who delivers the objective results of his society. It seems to have been the historical function of these European artists to act out the collective needs for a newly born identity and the

urge for a new concept of 'ego' and 'personality'. For this purpose they had attitudes which oscillate on a broad scale of irrational archaic behavior:

and high priest via victim and fool down to clown and entertainer.14 All reflect-in very different ways of course-the society's need and interest in of a new and unique personality and, as in the case of Mathieu and Klein, s submissive reaction 'to 1 it, or, as in the case of Manzoni and Beuys, a

gesture toward the potential reality of a collective subject.

and Pollock Pollock a Frenchman, there would be, I feel, no need by now to call

to my objectivity in ,praising him: he would already be called maitre there would already be speculation in his pictures."15

Greenberg, 1952

Certainly Mathieu's lasting merit will be to have organized the first showings of Wols' and Pollock's paintings in Paris. And it is characteristic that in his rush to install his own paintings among these masters, he was not able to discern the elementary differences between the two. If the first was the completion of ecriture automatique and its radical subjectivity in painting, the latter was an entirely new beginning of the objectification of the process of painting itself. This is most clearly revealed in a comparison between the structural organization of mass in canvases by Pollock and those of Wols or even more so of Mathieu. One of the basic differences between European and American art of that period-with its lasting effects on the contemporary situation-becomes visible in the entirely different attitudes toward the act of painting and art itself. Pollock's dominant concern is for the matter of painting, for materia prima and the visual-plastic reality of his work as an objective factum. And more so, their highly dialectical interchange endow Pollock's paintings with their innate objective radicality: the decentralized field of self-referential plastic equivalents. Mathieu's painting however, like a caricature out of misapprehension, ends up in a demonstrative frozen gesture, which shoyvs all the trails of its almost compUlsive egocentric motivation. The result of Mathieu's 'act' is painterly facture in centralized focal composition, although it prEltends to be the immediate concretion of pure velocity and time. Its painterly reality however is nothing more than a dead hierarchic figure on a most traditional ground.

Mathieu's work represents an extreme and final phase of academicism based on the surrealist concept of the 'liberating forces' of the subject's subconscious which was used as a tool for dissolving objective historical reification. It had been proven by Pollock's painting that not even the slightest residue of 'private' imagery should interfere with those forces, and that there was no longer any need for an 'artistic' or 'subjectivist' imagination (in the literal sense of the word of furnishing somebody's mind with images) which need be superimposed on the viewers perception. This level of abstraction constituted a considerable move away from surrealist painting practices, and was a negation of art conventions in favor of the potentially real process of individualization. Mathieu's anecdotal private spectacles and his epiphenomenal gesticulation, on the contrary, attempted not only to reactivate the more traditional forms of painting but even more so the equally restorative ideas on the artist's role in society. Or, on a totally different level of analysis, one could hypothetically argue that it was Mathieu's ludicrous dilemma as artist to try in vain (and vainly) to reinstate the gesture of the painter as the equivalent of the free-wheeling private entrepreneur, whereas Pollock had already been dialectically reflecting objective conditions under an advanced state of monopolist economic organization-with its potential for increased . individual freedom and its reality of increased oppression.

Klein and Kaprow Born in 1928 and 1927 these two artists might well be chosen as another

pair of opposites to illustrate the history of European and American specifities. In fact they are both members of the first generation that had learned substantially

@

from its antecedents. Kaprow, who had done his master's thesis on Mondrian and had extensively studied the work of Pollock, considered his own work as a necessary extension of the tradition outlined by these painters:

"Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our senses we shall utilize the specific substances of sight. sound, movement, people, odors, touch. Objects of every sort are the materials of the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things which will be discovered by the present generation of artists. Not only will these bold creators show us, as if for the first tim!3, the world which we have always t:lad about us, but ignored, but they will disclose entirely unheard of happenings. . "16

By joining a most authentic and radical reading of the original surrealist implications in Pollock's parnting with the heritage of theatrical activities as they had been performed in revolutionary Russian theatre and Dada activities alike, Kaprow arrived at a basis for his own work, which was then a convincing continuation and transformation of surrealist and Dada anti-art attitudes towards a new dialectical interchange between art and reality; as it had been put before by the great philosopher of that transformational process, John Cage:

"I think daily life is excellent and that art introduces us to it and its excellence the more it begins to be like it."

This attitude which was held by a whole generation of American artists, from Cage and Cunningham to Kaprow and the Fluxus activists and by the early Rauschenberg and Yvonne Rainer, could be summed up as the positive guest for a

~.*~~een life an

Joseph Beuys during his activity 'Wie man dem loten Hasen die Bi/der erk/art' (How to explain the pictures to a dead hare) at Galerie Schmela,

. Dusseldorf 1965 Photograph by Ute Klophaus

88

Piero Manzoni showing one copy of his multiple edition of Merda d'artista, 1961.

Rene Magritte and Marcel Broodthaers in 1967 Photograph by Maria Gilissen-Broodthaers

Daniel Buren, Photo-Souvenir d'xposition d'une Exposition at documenta V (1972) Kassel. Photograph showing Jasper Johns' painting 'Flag' (1958, collection leo Castelli, NYC) and Daniel Buren's work on the wall underneath, white on white striped paper.

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Duchamp's Unhappy Ready Made (1919) as of his Elevage de Poussiere (1920) , Klein's Portraits-Reliefs from 1962 relate as well to Duchamp's plaster and latex cast pieces from the late fifties like With my Tongue in my Cheek (1959). The certificates for the exchange of pure gold for parts of the Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity Zone show Klein's knowledge of Duchamp's Monte Carlo Bonds (1924), however, without achieving or maintaining the original dialectical wit in regard to reality which all of Duchamp's work radiates. Thus Klein, quite in opposition to Kaprow and the Fluxus activities, represents the incorporation of a petit bourgeois

reactionary position which always had been lingering in the air around late Parisian surrealism. It found its most symptomatic figure in Dali whose techniques of

,self-scandalizing mythology Klein seems to have studied thoroughly. Their central aim was to maintain under any historical circumstance an idea of the artist as a narcissistic elitist, as 'a sort of superman' as Marcel Duchamp once had put it, which would fit the restoration of pre-war social hierarchy and its more recently established members.

Klein and Judd In retrospect it is therefore ail the more astonishing that Klein's work which

attempted to maintain issues that had already been proven obsolete by a large number of young American artists and by their European predecessors, should

have found such an unusual degree of appreciation in the United States. Klein was the first-and only?-European artist of that time who 'made it' for example on the cover of Artforum (January 1967), if that is of any significance, and the same year he had a major retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York-a proof of appreciative interest that no other European artist of that time had achieved. It comes as even more of a surprise to read that Klein seems to have been the figure recognized by the younger generation of American artists of the early sixties, as revealed in Bruce Glaser's Interview with Stella and JUdd. Even more explicitly in his written criticism Judd frequently refers to Yves Klein as the only relevant European painter who had dealt with formal issues of prime importance to his own concerns: flatness, abolition of relalionalism, wholeness and the painting as object. Judd, who was born as was Klein in 1928, in his essay on Barnett Newman from 1970 goes as far as including Klein among 'the world's best artists' and continues:

"At the moment, despite the difficulties of comparisons and the excellence of the work of Rothko, Noland and Stella it's not rash to say that Newman is the best painter in the country. Also the work of these four artists and that by Reinhardt and Lichtenstein, is considerably better than the European painting evident in the magazines and that is shown in New York, except for Yves Klein's blue paintings."2o

Thus, in obvIous and conscious disregard of any of the implications involved in Klein's works, their historical and art-historical conditioning, their materiality (e.g. the monogolds) or their process of production (e.g. the Anthropometries), and

the broader context and significance these works gain by virtue of the propagandistic declarations of their author, Judd as late a als an attitude of formalist criteria and judgment in art. See our European vantage point

------~ "'"

today it is hardly comprehensible, and therefore might hint at another aspect of a specific difference between recent American and European formal thinking. How J can one appreciate Klein's blue paintings without considering along with' them the totally corny monogold relief paintings? What can the attraction of the sponge -paintings be once they are discerned as decorative relics of a derivative post -surrealist painting-into-object attitude? How can one appreciate the ~ anthropometries without considering their act of production? How can one admire somebody's 'art' disregarding his 'mind'-supposing they might not be an integral whole-when the artist in question on the occasion of the 'Inauguration of the Pneumatic Epoque' indulged himself with quasi-fascistic announcements like the following:

"Our government pure and scandalous will eliminate the puppets, the FranQoise Sagans, the Genets, the George Duhamels, the Einsteins, the Roosevelts, the Pandit Nehrus, the rats and garbage cans. "21

Or the formalist approach, seen another way: how inaccurate and imprecise is a formalist description and appreciation of a visual work, if it is not even capable of making out the implications inherent (and obvious) in the appearance of the work?

Fortunately we know from a lucid analysis of Yves Klein's work, published relatively early by the American critic Dare Ashton, that the formalist attitude itself is only one possible historical position to be taken in regard to Klein, and not a specifically American one at all, but rather one which seems to be defended by a generation of artists who, after having learned their art-history lessons better than their history lessons, seemed to be concerned mainly with the prblem of inserting their production into the mainstream of 'formal' tradition. As Ashton put it in her essay on Mathieu, Klein and others:

"He was a reactionary in the sense that many of the young intelligentsia were reactionaries in the post-war decade: theirs was a reaction against the great wartime currents of commitment, summarized by existentialism ... when many older French intellectuals were frantic with horror, the fevered prose accompanying the 'revolution' in the visual arts was coyly transmundane, limiting itself to exalted discussions of new cosmologies, new psychism, new infinite beyonds, and new brotherhoods in some distant future in the infinite beyonds where 'other' art would conquer ... Under cover of cascades of hyperbolic prose promotion, a host of younger artists stepped out into the world of show business, bringing 'reality' to their hungry bourgeois patrons ... the fossils of one of these lives, dessicated and boring, are on view at the Jewish Museum. No one better exemplifies the shift in values, the switch from art as a private affair to art as a public event, than the late Yves Klein. The souvenirs of his life of spectacle are poor dead things. Bereft of the confectioner, the life of his art has vanished."22

Formalism and historicity could be more clearly defined and distinguished by now. Both concepts have to be regarded as the opposite ends of an axis on which art activities seem to be permanently shifting according to their own and to historical conditions. Of course neither of them could be called specific per se to European or American art of the recent decades, but it seems that at precisely the point

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" d attempted to furnish the aesthetical work with a new objective function in order to save its author and his product from the malediction f existin as an aesthetical objec a e to ot erwlse I trable and unalterable conditjg[1s pf historicaLr:.eahly, rom etng;as Max Raphael had definedit as early as 1938, a

/'Tcaterer of "chic:" Ou-tIC/J... "Chic is another feeling of contrast. It develops out of two altogether

'r I'tlhlh') different sources: either the masquerade of outer elegance under which the individual pretends to continue his fight against society, or an abstract idealization and embellishment which develops exactly to the degree to which the real human being becomes a caricature. In the first case dandyism is. a conscious irony deriving from the tragiC and comical separation of the singular individual from society and the feeling of superiority of the ----

'paradoxical unique' over the bon sens of the philistines; in the second 'embellishment' is the desire of the disproportioned and dehumanized aesthetical illusion, for false harmony and pretended proportionality, for fata morgana of all contradictions being resolved. In both cases Chic become an integral element of high art."24

Neo Dada dimensions 'It se~ms useful to emphasize that none of the artists whose work

changed the European notion of contemporary art---'-at least in the terms of essay-has been substantially influenced by the work of Yves Klein, which not of course exclude the possibility that other European artists in this show have acknowledged Klein's impact. The work of the! Bechers and Broodthaen Brouwn and Buren, Darboven, Richter and Toroni dpes show on the other various degrees and forms, transformations of ideas and practices that had founded by European artists of the fifties and early sixties, who have had both then and now much less of a place in European or }\merican art criticism and general appreciation. This is true of Klein's countertigure. the Italian Piero Manzoni, as well as for the lesser known group of French pftcollagists 01!trAhe Hains and Villegle (and their Ttalian colleague Rotelfa). These artists' basic attitudes and concepts seem to have been objective aesthetical and historical issues, which were consequently unfolded and developed, transformed and extended up to the level of present day discourse. .

Villegle's anonymous lacerations " ... it is within the real. by the real and with the real that the 'affiche laceree' gains its consistency and imposes its presence. But it's just because he doesn't resign reality that the anonymous lacerator, who feels the restraint of reification pending on him, acts by protesting in. particular against the psychic violation of the masses by the public propaganda. By this he introduces the domain of potentiality of childhood right into the of adults."25 Jacques de la Villegle, Les Boulevards de la Creation

'Lacere Anonyme,' the anonymous lacerations of billboards-the term used by Villegle to describe the result of an artistic contract between the artist as a chOOSing collector and those anonymous artistic actions-could be called the most underestimated and mjsuQQerstood 911 activity in post-war European art: it ?night represent in fact the first legitimate and highly onglnal ~Utopedi1 contribution to the development of a new artistic language after Dada and Surrealism in Paris.26 Being aware of given (art) historical conditions, ranging from the concept of the Ready Made to Schwitters' collage and assemblage aesthetics to the radicality of Pollock's all-over pictorial field which accomplished the idea of gestural automatism, they deliberately transferred their realm of painterly actions from the studio and the canvas into the street as early as 1949. It might be most rewarding to see and read their works in terms of the critical terminology of New

Gerhard Richter and Blinky Palermo. Joint exhibition at Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Cologne 1971: 'Waif painting and two sculptures'

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York School painting and its consequent discussion in inimal theory whose q main concerns are, among others, the final abolition of the cu IS grid structure, the elimination of shallow illusionistic space, the flatness of the painted surface, . the quality of the painting as autonomous, self-referential object, the non-relational organization of formal elements and finally the anonymous procedures and materials of production. These concerns can be found in the works of Villegle and Hains, Dufrene and Rotella. Without bringing up the ludicrous question of 'who did what first' one should point to the differences in these artists' self-comprehension and attitudes toward given historical reality in their pursuit of similar painterly and formal concerns. Their work has been discarded all too easily as simply having extended Duchamp's Ready Made into a different materiality, the formal and plastic language of Schwitters into larger dimensions, and the aesthetics of Matisse's 'Papiers Decoupes' into a more modernist look. In fact, the work of Villegle and his friends deliberately and consciously transformed those presuppositions by inducing qualitative historical differentiations and introducing 'entirely new attitudes, which radicalized the inherent dimensions of their predecessors' work and developed the implications of this work into the present. :As Villegle himself has pointed out:

"To plunder, to collect, to sign the lacerated affiches and to live with them and to expose them in galleries, salons and museums, this is not a questioning of the artwork in the sense of Duchamp's Ready Made but more a questioning of the professional and traditional artist."

And elsewhere:

"After all, I cannot consider the laceration of the Anonymous or my selection of it as a transcription or objectivation of a singular lived experience of a gifted and predestined individual, the artist ... The gestural savagery of a multitude is individualized to become the most remarkable manifestation of 'art made by all and not by one' of this period."

It represents a considerable progression both from Duchamp's .. JonymousIY manufactured objects, transformed into art by declaration, and from ;lchwilters' found objects, aestheticized by arrangement. The anonymous gesture

and the very activity of the 'inconscient collect if' to which Villegle frequently enter by choice the realm of artistic reflection. It represents an equally

Ionsiderable step away from the surrealists' traditional ideas (and idealization) of i collective unconscious. This had found its final form in Dubuffet's Art Brut

and production and ever since the 'discovery' of the works and of exotic primitives and local schizophrenics had been an idiosyncratic

(historical-geographical as well as socio-psychological) and a reversed n of seemingly lost states of a fictitious, innocent productivity that the

of bourgeois society were raving about as they searched for new With 'Lacere Anonyme' the artist, quite in the tradition of the 'flaneur

holique,' ranging from Baudelaire to Duchamp, restricts his own

passive-receptive activity to the act of 'choix,' the choice which is even less of a productive gesture than Duchamp's 'declarative act.' In conscious negation of his traditional role, he cedes his place to the collective gesture of productivity, which in Villegle's historical situation had been that of stuporous aggression against the imposed alienation and 'psychic viofation by the public propganda.' As a collector who binds himself to the anonymous producer, the artist takes over the role of the historian; inasmuch as he acknowledges the potential of collective gestures and their growing consciousness, his own art gains historical significance and authenticity. How this contract between artist-collector and anonymous producer has evolved in the work of Stanley Brouwn and Marcel Broodthaers and in the systematical documentation of 'Anonymous Sculptures' by Bernhard and Hilla Becher will be discussed.

It is against this background that 'formalist' concerns gain their transparence and convincing necessity: inasmuch as the abolition of illusionistic space is a material equivalent of the abolition of projective subjectivism; inasmuch as the presence of the painterly self-referential object demands that of a conscious subject; inasmuch as its holistic form is the actual sign of separate ideptity and the elimination of relationalist composition is the result of the artist's conscious negation of his traditional role; insofar as all these formal principles can be seen and read in the works of the 'Lacere Anonyme.' Villegle phrased it in this way: " ... Lacere Anonyme opens up with four cuts of the razor blade a window into the flatness of the affiche-objet. A beam of daylight thus cuts through the obscurity of the ways in which the financial and political powers arrive at the ends they impose on mankind. The unknown poetry reveals and destroys the schematizations of propaganda and publicity."

Manzoni's analytical concepts "Manzoni is dead, physically dead. He was young. Is there a connection between his untimely death and the attitude that he took on in the context of art? It is most certain that insisting on his kind of humour was not a very comfortable position to have taken. And if this should be the reason, then our inquiry into artistic events, into all kinds of events, will have to be profound and thorough. In any case Manzoni will be in the history books of the terrible twentieth century."27 Marcel Broodthaers

When Broodthaers wrote this after Manzoni's death in 1963 he considered himself-and was in fact-still a poet and critic whose own visual production started shortly thereafter. Thus those lines could be read in two ways, first as a very profound comprehension of Manzoni's ideas and work, especially to the extent they point to the central aspect of investigative and analytical nature, and second as a promise of continuation and extension of Manzoni's legacy, which Broodthaers actually realized in his own artistic production. Whereas Klein can be rightfully considered a terminal figure-as was Mathieu-who left almost no traces in contemporary art, except perhaps in works like those of the Poiriers, the

opposite can be said to be true o~. While nowadays 'We almost~en looking at "the poor corpses of

blue paintings"-as Ashton put it-which, by their formalist and aestheticist pretence exclusively refer to immaterial metaphysical sensitivity and spirituality (and these notions may be easily replaced by more modernist notions of purely aestheticist concepts like the tautological nature of art), they actually represent, given historical reality, a concrete glorification of restorative domination and worldly octroi. It is in looking at Manzoni's work that we still experience the presence of his gestures to open up sights of materialistic recognition and to mediate, by means of his art, a concrete experience for the individual autonomous subject. Or as discerned by. the Italian critic Sarenco:

" ... the work of Klein is conservative, the work of Manzoni is revolutionary ... In Klein there is nietaphysics, childish obsessions. In Manzoni there is violent irony, desire to change things, a materialist conception of the world. Klein is a man of despair, a romantic, a decadent; his work closes a cycle of avant-garde. Manzoni is a man of the concrete, a provoker, his work opens the way of the contemporary avant-garde."28

Manzoni can be considered a source for most aspects central to contemporary European art. If one could hypothetically say that Duchamp at least occasionally acted as if playing games or as dreaming-that is as far as the long-range theoretical and epistemological consequences of his art are concerned-Manzoni adapted those Duchampian attitudes to the post-war period by changing them into preconscious hypotheses. The following generation of present-day artists inverted Manzoni's preconscious hypotheses into a wide spectrum of fully conscious theses. Each progression at each time consisted of the singularization of elementary notions of visual and spatial (i.e. mental and physical) modes of experience (of art): the successive quantitative extension which was induced by the singularization of the constituting elements of the artworks caused a qualitative change toward a radical public openness of the works, and their progressive dissolution of aesthetic semblance in favor of its actual materiality brought with it dialectically an increasing degree of conceptualization.

Lines from Duchamp, Manzoni and Brouwn One could say for example that Duchamp's Trois Stoppages/Eta/on (3

Standard Stoppages), 1913, represented an almost unimaginable step of singularization of a particular aesthetical aspect (and as such of course an abstraction) in the context of contemporary art at that time. This work was certainly at the root of Manzoni's Line works (from 1959 on) of different dimensions (up to 7200 m, and one of infinity which was a massive wooden black body). One could as well argue that Manzoni's work in turn was certainly most relevant, if not an immediate influence on Stanley Brouwn's early spatial-c;onceptual works (for example his piece No. 34 from 1962: a walk from a to b: b to a: a to b etc., 100 times 29) in which Brouwn intentionally introduced the

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notion of the space-time continuum into a sculptural-visual work, or as own formula says: distance = length, length = distance. The visual-malt appearance of Duchamp's piece is most intricate and subtle, both of complexity and complicated richness of aspect. Its materials range rulers to golden lettering, from glass panes to meter sticks, from canvas leather labels, all of it finally encased in a croquet box. Equivalent to is the perceptual-conceptual complexity of Duchamp's work, ranging as does-just to name a few aspects-from apperception of relationships and form, the question of conceptual identity and perceptual dissimilaritl spiritual conception of a work, its processual action and execution to result and body of that work as a physical reminiscence of that past time. Manzoni's line works (for example, Line 1000 Meters Long 1961, paper in chrome plated metal drum, 20% x 15%", The Museum of New York) in comparison are simplistically reduced. Their material by no means less elaborate than Duchamp's, is equally simplified and the most elementary qualities of a material: a plastic body constituting containing a work of art. As far as the work's perceptual and conce are concerned, its main characteristic in comparison to the the singularization and isolation of the one constituent and dominant artistic work: namely spatial extension as a visual sign and a literal Inasmuch, however, as this feature is isolated in Manzoni's work it is simultaneously magnified and thus gains an altogether innovative range qualitative aspects. The most prominent is its almost monumental and public openness. In comparison Duchamp's work has all the almost subjectivist intimacy and individualist privacy. Btlt to the extent the idea and the phenomenon of spatial extension are magnified and to the level of public monumentality, they are at the same time radically

their visual appearance) and dialectically concealed: this phenomenor spatial dimension, other than conceptually, is no more accessible. Visual appearance, its objective materiality, has been restricted to the object literally contains and conceals the idea and the phenomenon itself. By ingenious il!version Manzoni very clearly arrives at and defines a basic all conceptual art to follOW, which especially in the work of Bruce played a crucial role since 1965: the withdrawal of perception. In Man both the idea of the pure spatial dimension and its material concretion and given. But the artwork as material object negates itself totally in invisible conceptual dimension. As object, it appears only insofar as it negate the work's appearance as a containing concealment. The shiny surface of the chrome container literally throws back the perceptual of the viewer onto himself.

Manzoni's distinction as the originator of conceptual art pract!ces~!

\

years before Henry Flynt articulated his ideas-has therefore to be as the most innovative continuation and development of these dimensions since Duchamp. Thus he helped finally to overcome the Neo-Dada of art in the late fifties as embodied by the Nouveaux Realistes like

France (and also, at least in certain aspects, by Johns and Rauschenberg in the States) by introducing a new attitude of materialist conceptualization and of conceptualized material in art. What the American critic Robert Pincus-Witten in his appreciation of Manzoni's impact discerned as the central concern of his art when he said that" ... isolating constituent features of art, Manzoni paraded what he thought the essential futility of art as sensibility . . ,"30 could have been equally applied to Duchamp as it was his central concern, Manzoni's innovation leads much further however and has caused far reaching consequences in contemporary art. Manzoni recognized the essential futility of art which is a subjectivist activity that isolates itself from objective processes and from basic forms of perception and recognition.

Therefore it can be said that Manzoni's systematic, analytical approach to art provided a basis for a whole spectrum of entirely new and different attitudes and concepts in art activities of the sixties up until now, ranging from Broodthaers' practical museological investigations to Buren's elaborate and highly articulated

Imuseological analysis and theory, from Brouwn's introduction of the space-time nuum and his conceptual approach to spatial experience to Hanne

IDarboven's drawing systems which are exclusively concerned with the ; Quantification of time and its representation as elementary self-experience (which turn owe a lot to Stanley Brouwn's work). Or, in a totally different manner, the

I', 'strictly painterly activities of Gerhard Richter and Niele Toreni both in very " .different ways extend and continue the systematical inquiry into the act and '~prac!ice of painting, an investigation which had started in this particular way with : Manzoni's systematically ordered, all-white achrome material paintings and range his thumb prints on paper and eggs.

Brouwn "A This way Brouwn' is a portrait of a tiny bit of earth, Fixed by the memory of the city: the pedestrian." . Stanley Brouwn

tpyhen in 1960 Brouwn's first offLci.al.J::Jut;>lic_W9rk 1!nnOlJflc~9_aJlJhft,shoe Amsterdam were to be'.coi,1)?~ed ~...hi.s...a~, a major step in

pntemporary Eu'ropean art had been taken. ~This work not only acknowledged the relevance of Duchamp's Ready Mare concept but at the same time it

ilferentiated its meaning and enlarged its functions in various dimensions. The . of quantitative multiplication and serial equivalence had already been

by the Nouveaux Realistes-especially by Arman whom Brouwn had in Nice-but in the final analysis they had left both the concept and the formally and historically in a rather reified state, whereas Brouwn's idea of obviously leads away from the collectible (and collected) 1001 id objcet-s

and functioning reality context. What is more, Brouwn's shoe shop annou~Tiliimost humorous way his future concerns for participatory

for the spatial practice of the pedestrian is one of the most common

actual works as they walked over large sheets of white paper laid down in the streets (Works No. 1-8). It seems useful to remember at this point parallel activities like Rauschenberg's Tire Print, 1959, and Klein's "Anthropometries" from 1960 as weI! as Manzoni's "Finger Prints", and one can imagine the qualitative differences and the variety of implications which a structural comparison between the seemingly similar works and activities might reveal. But then in the very same year Brouwn inverts this practice altogether, he turns from passively collecting past traces, which unconscious pedestrians left on his papers, to actively instigating a dialogue with a consciously participating and producing subject:

"The duration of the creation of a 'this way Brouwn' is precisely limited, in contrast to what was previously generally done in art. There is no adjusting, no measuring, no rounding-off or embellishment of the result. The time Brouwn really needs to walk from A to B is compressed in the explanation-time of the passer-by in the street ... At the moment of explanation the situation is still in the future. He (the passer-by) makes a

in time and space."31 .

It is worthwhile comparing the subject-object (relatively the subject-subject) relationship and the changes it has undergone from Villegle's Lacere Anonyme to Brouwn's randomly chosen street' pedestrian as active participant. Whereas in Villegle's work the quality of 'objective anonymity' was still a necessary and crucial step in rendering more objectively the artist's activity, in retrospect his activity and role as artist were actually still considerably defined by artistic conventions: the act of choosing and its aesthetical criteria, the act of mounting and framing the chosen fragment of anonymous activities, the act of signing, etc. With Brouwn's work both sides have been juxtaposed in certain ways and the artist's_activi1 artici ation in the form of a I?roduct of?~sth~.hQicejs.entirely ~~" tJ.!LlLmits.himse 0 e.8. 5Sfu'W..Y. accidentaL~..Q~!l9.,s.pas,&Stf;by in the street for his explanation of the way as a projective spatial production. The result of this cooperation constitutes the work, which, even with the authentication of his stamp, This way Brouwn', indicates the objective nature of a process of production entirely dependent on the cooperation of different individuals. The potential participation of the collective subject actually becomes real inasmuch as the artist eliminates himself and his authorship. More correctly, inasmuch as the collective subject as a historical necessity becomes potentially real, the artist accelerates this process of development by negating his role and withdrawing his obsolete functions in dialectical gestures of anonymity. While the decollagist as artist was still the collector of the subject's unconscious gestures of furious stupor against imposed alienation, Brouwn's role is to anticipate in his dialogical art the forthcoming and forward-looking, self-conscious subject which is projecting its own self-determined future, or as Brouwn put it:

"It is not the past but the future which has the greatest influence on our ideas and actions."

Stanley Brouwn's work No. 34 (see above), once again in comparison to c:: I inA works, seems to have abolished any inrlin~ti()n t()WMr1 m::ltAri.,,1

appearance .. No,:,)hfl work simply exists as ay_erbaI2~!initi2.n 0L.~ pr9'l~dureml0 be possibly undertaken. The spatial mrnensionas an experience of temporal setj08f1Cevisibly realizes itself only in those printed words necessary to the defining description. This seemiogl}:'.~cor1]Plete vanishing of plastic materialit~ does not make the work fall into an idealistic trap of art which has become symptomatic for so many conceptual artworks that have developed since. Quite to the contrary. The potential execution of the piece can be accomplished by anybody who wishes to do so and is a very material practice of sculptural activity. Thus the highest degree of formal abstraction-and at the same time the most common and generally developed sense of formalization of signs, language-has become the equivalent to the highest degree of elementary material concretion: the potential practice of everybody's experience of spatial-temporal change in the basic activity of taking steps. The recipient to whom Brouwn addresses his art is a historically conscious subject who no longer supports the more or less complex models of heteronomous experience imposed on him. The artist who has almost disappeared in his role as author simply has restricted himself to the most objective neutral proposition, a written definition which can cause his work to take shape and function within given material reality itself.

As we have seen with the example of the transformation of concepts from Manzoni, similar mutational processes could be shown to reveal the considerable importance Brouwn's work has had for contemporary European art, if only, as is often the case, in a very subtle and hardly perceptible manner. It is intriguing to note how Manzoni's and Brouwn's materialist radicality and consequent degree of formal abstraction have found followers, imitators and surrogates for the 'sake of art.' By adding dimensions of transcontinental exoticism and romanticist attitudes toward 'nature' and mythical formal archetypes like spirals and the like (all most delicately photographed), the works of Richard Long have assimilated original

[

deaS of Stanley Brouv;n by inverting them into traditional art-modernisms. (See for example Brouwn's works No. 35 and No. 36 from 1962, A walk through a grassfield exactly on the same line a-b; every day during a full year, and compare Long's

'j works of the late sixties which execute and vary Brouwn's concepts and deliver the L results as sculpture.) It is most significant again that Donald Judd, in his

'Imperialism, Nationalism and Regionalism,' 1975, by ignoring the original works of Manzoni and Brouwn and consequently not realizing their implications, expresses his high appreciation for Richard Long's work by simply judging on formalist grounds of traditionalist modernism and thus ends up in the very mess he points to:

"It becomes a real mess when no one knows the difference between a good artist and a bad one, as they didn't, say, in 1959 between Rauschenberg and Michael Goldberg or Grace Hartigan. Or say now botween Richard Long and Daniel Buren or Jan Dibbets."32

Another example would be a work like Walter de Maria's Mile Long Drawing (Mohave Desert, 1968) which once again clearly refers to Manzoni's and Brouwn's concepts, in the same way his more recent and even more spectacular Vertical Earth Kilometer (Kassel, 1977) does. De Maria's works add to Manzoni and Brouwn

restoring to the notion of art precisely those qualities which they had deliberately

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done away with: pompous, spectacular attractiveness, oppressive, reifying, subconscious games and mystical symbolism (both of which are identical in the end anyway), ideological pretensions like exotically distant places, and, most of all-as is usual with academic work-gigantic dimensions.

There are, on the other hand, examples of authentic assimilations and transformations of Manzoni's and Brouwn's concepts. The American-Japanese artist, On Kawara, and the American-German artist, Hans Haacke, have developed their work in totally different ways and directions, partly out of the basic aesthetical concepts that had been formulated by Manzoni and Brouwn in the late fifties and early sixties. They have thus added considerably to our appreciation of reality and art by their activities. And it should finally be noted that the younger group of relevant post-minimalist American artists, like Michael Asher, Dan Graham and Lawrence Weiner have been fully aware of Brouwn's work and its functional immediacy for a long time and hold it in highest esteem, even though it may not . have left an immediate visual trace in their own works.

Marcel Broodthaers "I have fabricate~ instruments which were destined for my usage to understand the aspect of fashion in art, to follow it and finally to find a definition of that fashion. I am neither painter nor violinist. What really interests me is Ingres. I am not interested in Cezanne and his apples."33 Marcel Broodthaers '

It was during his sojourn in Brussels in 1962 that Manzoni declared in his Carte d'authenticite No. 71 (23.2. 1962) that Marcei Broodthaers in his entirely and for all future (red certificate) was to be considered.a work of art. It seems thai for Broodthaers, who was still a poet at the time and a photographer and critic, the confrontation with Manzoni may have functioned a9 one of the final initiating experiences-others were the visit to a show of the work of George Segal and Broodthaers' critical, ambiguous feelings about American pop-art-in launching his decision to change roles from poet to visual artist.. His very first works, which he showed in 1964 in Brussels under the title Moi aussi je me suis demande si je ne pouvais pas vendre quelque chose et reussir dans /a vie (/ too have asked myself whether / could sell ~J1tng and succeed in life), show the very strong impression which Manzoni must have left on him. For example, his very first work, the complete edition of his recent and final volume of poems, Pense Bete, he casl in plaster and thus 'objectified.' This influence is valid for both the perceptual and the conceptual aspect of Broodthaers' work, even though the latter developed very quickly and completely independently into his most original domain. Both artists share a similar spiritual attitude, namely that of an incredibly intricate and sagacious humor which seems to stem from the radical and annihilating insights of a deeply rooted skepticism and an almost childlike trust of the positive human future to come. With Broodthaers this attitude apparently takes the role of the acid melancholic with a seemingly insurmountable disillusion and critical negation as its rationalistic constructive counterpart. Perceptually, it is mainly in the sense of its original identity

I I ' 1of material and color that his work shows its indebtedness to Manzoni, Consider the 'achrome' non-color qualities of materials in Broodthaers' plaster assemblages and

!his egg-mussel-and-coal accumulations, Where the latter had used white 'achrome' fmaterials, Broodthaers finally turned them into black by using mussel-shells and t telephones, coal and suitcases, which were much closer to his everyday : surroundings. He was so poor at the time that no other materials were at !hand and also they corresponded to his ironic sense for the qualities of the i 'northern tradition.' f Of other contemporary influences which have been repeatedly detected in 'I' Broodthaers' early work, the most important is his relation to Arman in particular. When Arman had his first show in Brussels in the early sixties, Broodthaers dedicated the accumulation of syllables 'dad ada' in the guest book of the gallery,

! thus clearly indicating his doubts about a Neo Dada activity which simply carried Ion art concepts dating from a totally different historical context and applied them to I thE! present without major reflection or change. Later when asked whether he could identify the origins of his work in Nouveau Realisme, he answered:

"My first objects and images, 1964-1965, could not cause such confusion. The literalness shown in the appropriation of the real was intolerable to me because it meant an acceptance pure and simple of the ideas of progress in art ... and elsewhere."

, Most obvious however are the references which Broodthaers' work makes to its Dada and Surrealist ancestors, and this to such an extent that they have been entirely misunderstood. A strictly post-or neo-surrealist reading as Nicolas Calas' recent essay (Artforum, May 1976) does not aid in understanding. Broodthaers' first film, which he did as a poet and which in fact has to be considered as an early

,masterpiece in the long sequence of films that he later made as an artist, arose out 'of the spontaneity of enthusiasm that he had experienced when seeing his first exhibition of the work of Kurt Schwitters in Brussels in 1957. It was entitled La Clef de I'Horloge (Poeme cinematographique en I'honneur de Kurt Schwitters). Aside 'from a number of obvious and concrete references to works by Duchamp and Man Ray, a particularly strong semblance to Magritte's work misled many of Broodthaers' critics. He has of course t6 be considered as one of the few authentic pupils of Magritte, whom he had met briefly after the war. It was Magritte who introduced the young poet to the knowledge of Maliarme and Poe. For a number of years thereafter he maintained .a regular, friendly contact with him, first as a poet and later as a visual artist, but did not enjoy at ali-as it seems-the master's unreserved approval. As Broodthaers put it: "This is what Magritte has often reproached me for. He thought of me as more sociologist than artist." His own 'appreciation of Magritte, on the other hand, was not fuli either, as he stated, "Magritte with his Ceci n'est pas une Pipe is less easy. But even so, he was stili too

Magritte. This means that he was not enough 'Ceci n'est pas une Pipe.' From this pipe I started on my own adventure." And having once been asked whether he would situate himself in a surrealist perspective, after having recited a quotation from Breton's Surrealist Manifesto on the abolition of all contradictions, Broodthaers

answered, "I do hope that I have nothing in common'with this state of mind." The historical presuppositions from Dada and Surrealism that still seemed to have some validity and to be of interest for reintegration into contemporary art discourse, were Duchamp's Ready Made concept from 1913 on the one hand, and the theoretical implications of Magritte's 'linguistic' paintings from the late twenties and the thirties (such as Cec; n'est pas une Pipe, 1928, also known as The Treason of Images) on the other, which in fact had been an aesthetical-painterly application (not to say exploitation) of Ferdinand de Saussure's original recognition of the structure of language signs in 1915. Whereas one of the essential queries of Duchamp's concept had been to learn about the transformation from primary object reality into secondary sign reality (and vice versa), Magritte's inquiry quite to the contrary focused on the secondary nature of the (painted) sign and on the decomposition of the material signifiant and the immaterial signifie and their seemingly arbitrary relationship. Reduced to a formula: the sign potential of objective reality and the potential objectivity of signs, both basic epistemological questions into the nature of art and its historical conditioning, became the starting point of Broodthaers' work. But since he had also been a student in Lucien Goldmann's seminars, (who was turn the pupil of Lukacs, an eminent historian of literature and criticism of ideology in Brussels and Paris), and had read extensively in French structuralist theory and semiology in particular (of course he read Roland Barthes' Le Oegre Zero de I'Ecriture (1953), Mythologies (1957) and his Systeme de la Mode (1967) which enlarged de Saussure's linguistic model of the sign and transformed Helmslev's variation of this model as a metasign into a tool of critical reading of secondary ideological sign systems), Broodthaers had to acknowledge that neither production nor reflection of visual-aesthetical sign-systems could limit itself any longer to a pretension of self-contained and self-determined art historical thought or, as far as the producer was concerned, to a riarrow-minded art-and-craft ethos, centered on the formal problems of its modernist tradition. With the publication of his TMoremes in 1966 Broodthaers clearly announced the direction his future investigations would take by saying in his Theoreme No.3:

"Every object is the victim of its nature, even in a transparent painting the color stili hides the canvas and the moulding hides the frame."34

Broodthaers pointed to the fact that art, inasmuch as it had become historically overdetermined by elements alien to its own original concerns (for example, having become the object of commercial speculation to an extent unknown before or entirely dependent on its museological benediction and thus an object of cultural administration and thereby serving the representation of ruling

i~eO,IO,9Y)' could rega~,n ~nd __ m~~~:ain its, role a." nd fun, ct,ion, C:f,[~'.:'~a,I,ing", Ob, J,',eC,.t,ive] hlstoflcarrecogmtlon only to rlie'W';mm,Jllilil[couldoecome gapable of radically acknowledging the degree of its own aliena,ted_ state"and its cultural function of fartnering alienatio[1, only by making its own state of reification its own-subject matter. In keeping with these intentions Marcel Broodthaers founded in 1968 in Brussels the Musee d'Art Modeme (Section IXe siec/e) Oepartement des Aigies, which, upon invitation by its director, the artist, was inaugurated by a guest-director

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o '1 I" l:J(lood ( AJliJIA ,( J.t,:- t~ ~""' , ~ -;/.; (- t ,

of a 'real' museum, Dr. Johannes Cladders, in the presence of a number of guests and friends, among them Daniel Buren, Judging very rigorously one could argue

, that this was his first really major and far reaching work, Broodthaers' art r therefore started at the point where art normally ends-in the place of its official

\ accultUration, the museum. Consisting of a number of empty wooden cases which normally serve as transportation containers for highly valuable paintings, and a

i series of art-picture-postcards on the walls, th~ Museum of Madero Art inverted the traditional hierarchy of cultural organization by substituting the lowest elements of the given functional basis for the unique hieratic artwork and thus publicly questioned the origins of this hieratic image's aura, as pointed out in a later text on the museum, when Broodthaers asked, "Is a picture post-card of a painting by Ingres worth a couple million?" and when he commented on his museum project once as "L'ldee de ce Musee est nee de Mai '68" ("The idea of this museum was born in May '68"). The inferior object had not only been put into the place of the

\-. artwork itself, but even more the artist introduced himself in the role of cultural I administrator by claiming to be the director of the museum. Broodthaers'

museological enterprise, a most ambiguous and brilliantly ironic 'cultural' revolution, passed through different states in the following years and proceeded to open up various sections: XVlle Siecle in Antwerp, XIXe Siecle bis and Section du Cinema in DOsseldorf, and finally found its termination in 1972 with the by now famous exhibition, The Eagle from Oligocene up until today-Musee d'Art Moderoe, Section des Figures 35, which brought together more than 260 items from over 80 public museums and private collections in a structuralist reading of cultural signs and emblems of power all representing the eagle and ranging from relics of natural history to religious and mythological representations to artworks and contemporary advertising trivialities and commodities' brands and trade signs. In retrospect one recognizes it as an ingeniously prognostic announcement of the end of liberalism in West Germany. Each object was accompanied by a black plastic label bearing the catalogue number and stating in three languages, 'This is not a work of art.' Methodologically speaking Broodthaers had in fact combined for his own investigation the opposing concepts of Duchamp and Magritte-in the first instance the transformation of real!~~into (art)2!gns ELC!efinition of the artist (derived from the artist's original intention to transform art into a new reality), and in the second theJ.cansfprmatiQ[l of the sign (the representations of paLoling)jnto its r~Lelements, painterly signifier~a-na painted signified, or as Broodthaers put it more humorously:

\'to'''' '''This is not a work of art' is a formula which I obtained from the contraction of OO~ a concept of Duchamp and an antithetical concept of Magritte. This helped me ~. to decorate Duchamp's 'Urinoir' with the sign of the eagle smoking the pipe.

believe to have emphasized the prinCiple of authority which makes out of the eagle the colonel of art"

Most important for his method is the introduction of a third concept which bring~c\yssure's_ ling'::!ltic sig,,~modElI9S _a RJesuPRo~iti~Q via Magrttt.e..Jl!!'

into the present. Roland Barthes' concept of the 'mvth' as cOl"nnrbnl

system is superimposed on primary language for the needs of alien ideological interests. By fictitiously assuming the role of the museum historian and at the same time radically negating the art-status of the museum's content, Broodthaers reveals the museum as the place where art first and foremost obtains the status of secondary language, the place where it is defined as art or where its self-definition finds its approval. Thus his work opens up a perspective into both aspects simultaneously, into the historicity of the activity of art itself and into the definitions given to it post facto by its institutions, a perspective of art as being in itself as antagonistic as primary and secondary language necessarily have to be. On the other hand, Broodthaers' museology reveals the reality of the phenomena of 'art' and returns these phenomena to their original historical status. They appear as an almost unclassifiable variety of highly differentiated objects, each bound to its unique and most individual peculiar historical situation, not to be isolated from the very particular condition under which it arose and developed itself, on which it . depended materially and historically. By polemically inverting the most famous formula of conceptual idealism in art, Kosuth's 'Art as :Idea as Idea,' Broodthaers put it this way: "Reste I'art comme production comme, production. (It still remains valid, art as production as production)." It could therefore be argued that Broodthaers' museum projects posited that, if the artist has finally become the critical historian of his own craft, then reality, as conscious history, should become art.36 Broodthaers' visual language follows a strategy which might easily be misapprehended and which is probably assumed by its author to induce such misunderstanding. 'Nouveaux trucs, nouvelles combines (new tricks, new cheats),' a device out of the ancient French comic-strip 'The Nibkel Feet,' which he included as a vignette in his major catalogues in Brussels and Paris, is finally also valid for his own art in its almost nostalgic qualities of typographical and stylistic refinement. His films and books in particular, and the altogether dated aura of 19th century bourgeois culture that many of his works seem to bring to mind, might easily seduce the viewer into dismissing these works as being obviously obsolete and not at aI/ concerned with the presuppositions of contemporary art of the modernist tradition, but derivative of 19th century literary concerns instead. Or, quite to the contrary the viewer might be totally enchanted by the secret attractions of the past and charmed by the works' retrogressive appearance which could greatly appeal to the viewer's own retrograde inclinations, As in the fables of La Fontaine, one of Broodthaers' most beloved authors to whom he dedicated his first film as a visual artist, where the animals as archaic antecedents of human beings speak their language so that the humans can more easily recognize themselves in their dated behavior in the present, Broodthaers speaks in old-fashioned art terms to a viewer expecting the modernist idiom. He has defined his 'romanticist' attitude toward the 'souvenir,' the historian's position to be taken within the present art activity itself. When asked at which point the artist would reach the essential state of an 'indifferent art' (as opposed to an engaged art like poetry which cannot become a commodity), he said:

"At that moment precisely when one becomes less of an artist, when the nec

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exhibitions have always and still depend on souvenirs of the epoque in which, I presume, the creative situation was one of heroic and solitary form. In other words one of Read and See. Whereas today it is: May I present to You."

Of course the work of Marcel Broodthaers situates itself historically in the 1 context of so called conceptual art. Along with Robert Barry, Dan Graham and ; Lawrence Weiner, whose work he highly appreciated, he very probably will have to he considered'one of the few truly visual artists who used language in a materialist 1 and dialectical manner (as opposed to a theoretical art-philosophical or poetical ! manner), thereby transferring our notions of art to a new level of abstraction, which * historically from Duchamp and Malevich on always meant art's inherent tendency to 1 dissolve itself in favor of true collective subjectivity, the very 'Read and See' as a 'i general condition of being. Broodthaers' fantasy of a more heroic and solitary

~ situation of the artist projected backwards into an unfathomable past, demands of 'course dialectically the future necessity of a receiver of art who has become a conscious historical subject himself.

When it turned out, however, that in the arts, even the written sentence, and . more so the spoken word, CQuid be easily turned into a newly reified commodity, l' he immediately changed positions. His terribly dull 'alphabet paintings' from the

early seventies and his magnificent major final work L'E/oge du Sujet (The Eulogy of the Subject)37 radically negate the premature heroic gesture of conceptual art

twhich in his eyes pretended too soon to have finally overcome the burden of the material and the historical world. Furthermore, as nobody had really learned to read

,:or-to see, art would have to start all over again. He thereby anticipated a collapse of art into the derivative forms of decoration and academism that we have to face

now. Bro,odthaers' critical skepticism addresses in particular the kind of positivist

enthusiasm which naively celebrates each aesthetical innovation as an ,Innovation of reality instead of a comprehension of it. His critical reading of the I' historical and ideological implications of art is just another more or less valid and effective attempt to decipher and transform reality. By being transformed it lost its ,intended primary functional object, language, which only could be capable of real change, and entered the state of secondary mythical language. A basic theory of art under our conditions was defined by Adorno as follows; '. "Even within radical art there is still so much falsehood, because by its anticipating construction of potentiality, in fact it neglects to construct il."38

Daniel Buren "The difference between art and the world, between art and being, is that the world and being are perceived by real facts (physical, emotional, intellectual) and art visualizes this reality. If the artist's vision of the world were concemed this could be a veritable consciousness of reality. But it concerns a product, -art-, that is the thing seen by the consumer; thus a fixed and arbitrary reality is proposed, a reality deformed by the individual who, wanting to express his own vision of the world, no longer expresses the real but makes an illusion of reality. "39 Daniel Buren

Museology is an enterprise of systematic investigation into the historical conditions determining production and perception of art, its modes of fabrication and distribution and its principles of installation and presentation. This enterprise became the central concern of the art producer himself and the work's dominant . ,X\I\ focus, and it has therefore become apparent as one of the prominent features in k~!.rV Broodthaers' work, latently from 1966 and manifestly as a key issue after 1968. (f.k Broodthaers' attitude had been that of the artist disguised as historian and the historian disguised as artist. The obsolete appearance of his work and its 19th century 'look' incessantly pointed in a literal and pragmatic manner to the state of present day art apperception as historically determined in its entirety by the 'Museum', this powerful institution of cultural administration which achieved its height in the 19th century (where it has remained) with the secularization of religion by the bourgeois culture. With the works of Daniel Buren we are confronted with an entirely different approach to the same problem-at the same time theoretically more explicit and practically more functional. Daniel Buren has approached this problem latently since 1965 and in an outspoken manner since 1969.

Broodthaers and Buren maintained a friendly relationship in the sixties, and this certainly has to be considered as a source of communication and exchange with regard to the central ideas of their work. Their main connection, ho~ever, probably was a similar interest in reading French structuralism and semiology. In regard to their political orientation, one could say that in Buren's case his approach to aesthetical activity as one form of practice was indebted to the thinking of Althusser in contrast to Broodthaers' more analytical-contemplative attitude toward history, which had been indebted to Lucien Goldmann. Their concem for semiological theory, Roland Barthes' in particular, seems to be comparable. In fact, both of their practical approaches to the problem of the museum can hardly be imagined without the theoretical foundations of Barthes' model of the 'myth' and his notion of the 'degre zero' of the sign as a state of objective language which one would have to arrive at were the activity of that language to achieve the dimension of practical and functional immediacy and transformational efficiency in its relationship to a given historical reality context. As Broodthaers once said, "I serve myself of the object as a wo'rd at the degre zero", 40 so Buren answered the question as to whether his work was actually proposing the 'zero degree of painting':

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"I'll push it further. I believe we are the only ones to be able to claim the right of being 'looked at,' in the sense that we are the only ones to present a

which has no didactic intention, which does not provide 'dreams', which is not a 'stimulant'. Each individual can dream himself and without doubt much better than by the trickery of an artist, however great he may be. The artist appeals to laziness, his function is emollient. He is 'beautiful' for others, 'talente(j' for others, 'ingenious' for others, which is a scornful or superior way of considering 'others.' The artist brings beauty, dreams, suffering to their domiciles, while 'the others,' whom I myself consider a priori as talented as artists, must find their own beauty, their own dream. In a word, become adults. Perhaps the only thing that one can do after having seen a canvas like ours is total revolution."41

This declaration, given in February 1968, not only testifies to the in aesthetical thought in that fervent period in Paris but also should be read as an indication of Buren's general understanding of his art activities which he has considered ever since to be a form of 'practice', a material practice of ideological criticism within the realm of the superstructure of art itself. Thus he was simultaneously negating both a traditional positivist attitude toward art as being an entirely separate and fully autonomous entity within human productivity as well as a non-dialectical manner of mechanistic thinking of certain vulgar marxist ideologies which tend to ignore the material reality and the power of ideology itself and therefore equally to ignore the artist's potential capacity to act (not only in art) efficiently within that field and to initiate possible transformational changes which, eventually, might have reflexive consequences within historical reality itself. In opposition to Broodthaers, who had repeatedly declared that art for him was only conceivable as an activity of critical negation, the practice of art for Buren enters a new state of constructive potential efficiency, very much in the tradition of Stendhal's famous dictum that painting was nothing but constructed morality ('La peinture n'est que de la morale construite', in L'Histoire de la Peinture en Italie). Broodthaers' work and attitude insert themselves-even by their very negation of that tradition-into an art historical tradition, that might have had its actual origins in the 19th century starting with Baudelaire as the passive, melancholic flaneur, who reflects the growing process of general reification within the formal analysis of his own artwork, never doubting, as Broodthaers put it, that art could not exist "otherwise than by being negation." This attitude reached its first climax within the visual arts with Duchamp's invention of the Ready Made. The consequent reduction of art and productivity to a mere act of declaration found, as we painted out before, its more contemporary adaptation and historical modification in the procedures of artists like Villegle and the Decollagists, who defined their activity as artists as

the anonymous collectors and historians of the collective gestures of revolt against this evergrowing state of reification.

Daniel Buren has mentioned that if there was any post-war European (Parisian) influence on his own work at ali, it might in fact have been the attitude of the decollagists in general and that of Villegle in particular. Buren's pre-valid early

works around 1962 consisted of 'papiers dec hires'. In :contradiction to paper objects' of the 'affiche laceree', Buren's 'decollages' were differently colored papers covered with a final layer of white paper torn off in an accidental manner to present the final pictorial result. This indicates the impact Villegle's work must have had earlier but even reveals the radical inversion of the artist's position that was to follow in development in his first original and authentic works after 1965. For valid to consider in thiS perspective Buren's description of a series of he executed in 1968 on more than two hundred public billboards in almost simultaneously by postal delivery and a museum instaiJation:

"All these works, executed within a very brieftime period in the used the interior and the exterior, static and mobile supports, (outside of the institution of the museum) and the author's name museum's system."42

The activities of the French decoliagists have been almost literally into a totally new comprehension of aesthetical procedure by this work. no longer the collector of the past relics of anonymous acts of the unconscious, but has become the conscious actor, positing himself anonymity as the proof of a potential collective conscious practice. Buren, the European artist's role identification changed again considerably the original attitude of post-surrealist infantilism of the artist as a unconscious actor on a stage limited by the bourgeois expectation for art spectacle of narcissism, the artist turned to the street and became the anonymous gestures. Consequently, as we have seen with the work of Brouwn, the artist began a systematic analysis of his own position and revealed the objectively given potential for conscious, autonomous Following this we discovered in the work of Broodthaers the artist becomin

conscious historian of his own craft, who, by his perpetual critical neg his own activity, dialectically pointed at the growing necessity and 'possibilit actual, instead of symbolic, transformations within a given reality context. work of Daniel Buren the European artist achieved a new state of identity. equally assuming the role of the critical historian of his own activity, Buren further in developing out of this role an anticipatory practice that inserts more in the historical development that had been founded by artists of constructivism and neoplasticism, who also had acted primarily on the their work would induce and accomplish actual transformations within reality Frequently Buren has referred to the instrumental aspect of his work, as functional tool of practical investigation, for which reason the interdependen~_.c theory and painterly practice in his work is absolutely indispensable. compare" ... apparition of the work as an instrument of questioning and not as moving and superficial found object"43 to Broodthaers' remark, quoted in 33, when he was describing his works as "instruments to understand the aspect fashion in art.") i~

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In Buren's work the historical realities of visual culture (i.e. its social and1 tJ political determinations) have become a visual-cultural reality in history. This 'V self-referential identity, as opposed to a formalist's notion of self-reference, is a dialectical one. Inasmuch as it understands itself to be a painterly practice, however, it owes a great deal to a painterly tradition that found its highest forms of development within the sQ-called formalist development. The work of Buren, who repeatedly pointed out that the apprehension of his work as painting would be

: necessary and integral to its understanding (which means that it should not be considered primarily as a conceptual investigation illustrating his theories or as a

. dematerialized work), has very much reflected the problems of painting -'~especially as the purest forms of material practice. He was concerned with tCezanne and his apples (see"Standpoints,' Five Texts, p. 33) and dealt thoroughly 1with the history of the evolution of painting since Cezanne, which he once Idescribed as follows in a schematic abbreviation: 1 "Thus contemporary art history would oscillate constantly between two poles 'i symbolized by Cezanne and Duchamp. The first represents the positive, open

pole and the second the negative regressive pole. ( ... ) History of art thus finds itself on the one hand, really fissured by the impetus given by Cezanne, a fissure enlarged here and there (ct. Mondrian, Pollock, Matisse, Newman, Stella)."44 American critic Roberta Smith was therefore quite right in saying that " ...

aspects of Buren's work as well as its formal nature-the broad regular (that is the lack of composition and imagery, and the scale)-involve a

cal extension of various ideas in the work of Judd, Flavin, Andre and most ,jI~"_",,,, Stella. "45

She fails to point out, however, where these extensions lead and what their 'I' Implications and consequences are. And furthermore, she makes the mistake of :, hinkinQ that to acknowledge the impact of Stella's work, who in turn was equally

to Andre, Flavin and Judd, at the same time means acknowledging an

I, nfluence of the whole generation of American minimal artists on Buren. There is ,ardly an influence of Judd's work visible or imaginable, and certainly none , hatsoever of Flavin. The 'objectification' of the painterly support, the decision of walls directly, the decomposition of the painting from the stretcher and its

elimination, which in the case of Buren did not necessarily end up with the ng becoming a sculptural object, has been a convincingly innate problem in

n's work.46 As for the,impact of Stella's work, which Buren had seen for the first in New York in 1962 (he paid his first visit to the States in 1957), Buren has outspokenly admitted the relevance of the early work of Stella for his own

lsthetic.al thought and the contemporary problems of painting in general. But to ecognize the impression which Stella left on Buren's painterly investigation, means ioestioning the issues and following the questions raised by Buren a little further

critics discerning this influence seem to have been willing or capable to do. It thEtrefore a typical dilemma of strictly visually oriented formalist criticism-as

Crimp has pointed out_47 to see stripes in Buren's work and to think of . (See for example Barbara Rose's statement: "Buren's nondescript and

deliberately ephemeral, non-qualifiable pieces vaguely resembling travesties of Stella's stripe paintings ... ")48 In this line of formalist reading one might then as well go one step further to reach