The Artist, the Sage, and
the Butterfly:
Ideas and Aesthetic Enjoyment in “Post-Conceptual” Art
by Clark Buckner
Among various ways to talk about the pluralism of
contemporary art, I have repeatedly encountered the term, “post-conceptual.”
To my ears, the expression implies two things about the contemporary
scene. The first is historical: the open-endedness of art since the
70s indeed developed largely, though not exclusively, through conceptual
art. When, in the wake of minimalism and its principled confrontation
with the limits of painting, sculpture, and music, it becomes feasible
merely to declare, “all the display windows of all the shoe
stores in San Francisco right now, that’s my art;” then,
as Arthur Danto explains, “everything is possible, or at least
anything is possible.”1 The defense of the autonomous work of
art dissolves beneath the weight of its own critical self-consciousness
and gives way to the pluralism of contemporary art, in which artists
no longer define their practices in terms of specific media, and art
can no longer be clearly distinguished from industrial projects, commercial
advertising, personal collections, social gatherings, and other aspects
of everyday life.2
The second implication that the term “post-conceptual”
has for me extrapolates from these conditions and draws a conclusion,
with which I am not entirely comfortable. Because artists now often
work between different media and don’t define their practices
in disciplinary terms as, for example, painting or sculpture, some
draw the conclusion that the media don’t matter: what matters
is the idea. In this sense, post-conceptual art is understood as conceptual
art. It not only bears the mark of its historical legacy; it carries
on its practice. And the practice of conceptual art is understood
as putting art at the service of ideas.3
As someone with training in academic philosophy, I have been wary
of this conclusion for two principle reasons. Language and thought
handle concepts with far greater rigor and clarity than images. If
post-conceptual artists were indeed only interested in ideas, wouldn’t
they have given up their art practices long ago and gone back to the
books? If ideas really do trump images in post-conceptual art, wouldn’t
we have to conclude that post-conceptual artists are lazy, pretentious,
pseudo-philosophers, who remain mired in picture thinking? And isn’t
at least some contemporary art better than that?
Also in the history of modern philosophy, the relationship between
ideas and aesthetics has been more complicated. Indeed, some like
Hegel and Danto argue that scientific self-consciousness trumps the
enjoyment of art in the development of the modern world. However others,
like Schiller, Nietzsche, and Freud, see art as an antidote to the
all-too-coherent logics of conceptual thought. For them, artwork doesn’t
merely express ideas in cloudy images but articulates contradictions
in us and in experience, which conceptual thought implicitly disavows
insofar as it presumes to be able to explain them away. Under the
influence of this romantic line of thinking, philosophers from Kierkegaard
and Heidegger to Blanchot, Derrida, and Deleuze have adopted performative
approaches to philosophical writing and explored the poetics of language
and thought in opposition to the over-valorization of conceptual clarity.
And finally to treat contemporary art primarily in terms of the dominance
of ideas simply seems wrong. On the one hand, it fails to acknowledge
that ideas always have been part of the enjoyment of art – not
merely as theoretical or political positions expressed by artworks,
but as aesthetic ideas inspired by the formal tensions of the works
themselves and, as such, intrinsic to them.4 On the other hand, treating
contemporary art as conceptual fails to acknowledge how thoroughly
sensuous it has become.
As a glaring example of this confusion, literature accompanying Mathew
Barney’s recent exhibition at SFMOMA, Drawing Restraint, identified
him as a conceptual artist. If Barney’s orgiastic spectacles
are conceptual, the term means nothing or, at best, the opposite of
what would seem to be intended. Rather than expressing the centrality
of ideas in art, the term “post-conceptual” would imply
that conceptual art and the other anti-aesthetic movements of the
twentieth-century have been altogether left behind. We are once again
free to indulge our sensuous impulses without being bothered by disturbing,
self-conscious reflections on the conditions of our enjoyment. And
the appeal to concepts in name would act only as an abstract (and
as such meaningless) guarantee that the work is meaningful, while
sparing us from actually thinking – like the lexicons identifying
the “significance” of distinct elements of the work, which
Barney often provides.
Sticking to the first, historical implication of the term outlined
above, the programming at MISSION 17, where I work as a curator, might
rightly be described as “post-conceptual.” The artists
who show there often don’t identify their practices in terms
of specific media or disciplines. They often appropriate images and
forms from commercial, amateur, and other extra-artistic sources.
And some have almost entirely left behind formal, aesthetic considerations.
Among other approaches, they have instead orchestrated interpersonal
encounters, explored the objectivity of social scientific discourse,
and crafted exhibitions of everyday objects solicited from amateurs.
So where do they stand with regard to the second implication of the
term “post-conceptual,” which I have outlined above, and
the questions it begs concerning the relationship between ideas and
aesthetic enjoyment?
Among all the “post-conceptual” projects undertaken at
MISSION 17, none has borne the mark of conceptual art’s legacy
as obviously as Michael Zheng’s As The Butterfly Said to
Chuang Tzu. Within the framework of my curatorial practice, the
show marks something of a limit, which defines the “conceptual”
within the “post-conceptual.”5 Nevertheless, aspects of
the show were decidedly beautiful. Zheng’s articulation of his
ideas remained rooted in, and dependent upon an aesthetic encounter.
And the intellectual enjoyment provided by the show often had a distinctly
affective quality. Despite its epistemological orientation, one might
say, the show was poetic. As the Butterfly Said to Chuang Tzu
thus provides a rich occasion to explore the relationship between
ideas and aesthetic enjoyment in contemporary art. Does the media
matter in Zheng’s work? Does it merely serve ideas, which otherwise
remain independent of it? If not, what is the relationship in Zheng’s
art between thought and aesthetic enjoyment? And what does this imply
about the force of concepts in art today?
The title of the show, As The Butterfly Said To Chuang Tzu,
announced it as a study in perception. The Taoist sage Chuang Tzu
famously dreamed he had turned into a butterfly. When he awoke, he
couldn’t help but wonder whether it was he, who had dreamed
of becoming a butterfly, or the butterfly, who had dreamed of becoming
Chuang Tzu. Zheng’s concerns in the exhibition were primarily
epistemological. He was interested in how we know what we know. And
the show focused specifically on questions about framing, and how
shifts in seeing aspect shape experience.
To explore these questions, in much of the show, Zheng employed the
gallery itself as the medium of his work.6 For "Hole in the
wall,” he hammered a hole in the wall, photographed it,
and covered the hole with an image of the hole, leaving only the tip
of the actual hole visible above the photograph. Had Zheng actually
damaged the wall? I was around when he was installing the show, but
frankly I didn’t know for sure. Was this a photograph of a hole
in another wall, taken somewhere else and mounted here? Or was it
not a representation at all, but rather a transparent piece of plastic
over an actual hole?
A second piece, “The Wall,” took these questions
still further. Zheng photographed an area of the wall and posted the
image onto the wall itself. The absence of any obvious content provoked
formal questions. What is the relationship between the wall and the
representation of the wall? How is the distortion of the photograph
different from the refraction of a transparency, if that’s what
the piece actually is? Where does the wall end and the piece begin?
What is presented here and what is being concealed?
“The Pillar,” similarly played with these dynamics
of presence and absence in the constitution of experience. Zheng encased
in plywood an actual pillar in the center of one gallery wall. Was
there a pillar there? I could hardly remember. Was this a work of
art or a necessary structural support? The exposed wood made the piece
look like the wall was obnoxiously still under construction. Did it
actually “work’ – as edifice or artifice?
And, for “The Big I,” Zheng cut out an 8’
by 1.5’ rectangle from the wall and raised it by one half an
inch. In this piece, Zheng’s epistemological concerns reached
a certain limit. What was the piece and what was the gallery? The
gallery itself had become the piece, framed by the rectangle cut in
it – not positively as a drawing, but negatively as an absence,
a bracketing of the gallery.
Each of these pieces raised questions that might be considered equally
appropriate, if not more so, to philosophical epistemology. Nevertheless,
as an artist, Zheng did not leave behind or even actively thwart the
viewer’s aesthetic enjoyment of the work. His questioning remained
rooted in the construction of encounters, which were aesthetically
rich as well as intellectually stimulating. In fact, the two could
hardly be separated. And, in this regard, the medium mattered. Zheng’s
use of the gallery walls, of course, suggested that he had no medium;
but in fact the show employed photographic, sculptural, and drawing
techniques, which only seemed to disappear on account of Zheng’s
subtle mastery of them. Furthermore, Zheng exhibited a refined
capacity to engage the limiting conditions of his surroundings, both
aesthetically and intellectually. This is the technique that
frames Zheng’s eclectic use of other media and, despite the
conceptual nature of his concerns, it had a look like any other. Zheng
asked specific questions in specific ways. And his questions not only
stimulated thought - they resonated.
“Hole in the Wall,” presented a subtle composition
in which the otherwise empty picture plane was interrupted by an almost
circular shape set asymmetrically in the upper-right-hand corner.
This hole itself was composed of small fragments of various shapes,
which often overlapped or collapsed in against one another. And they
surrounded an off-yellow shape with a different texture, comprised
of insulation from behind the sheet rock that now was revealed. As
well as conceptual, “The Wall” could be enjoyed
as a minimalist composition: a simple off-white rectangle with hints
of purple and blue, whose opacity seemed to shift as one moved towards
and away from it. “The Pillar” was a sensuously textured
wooden sculpture, which stood against the wall with a commanding physical
presence. And “The Big ‘I’” oscillated
between a sculpture and drawing, which Zheng talked about even as
representational – a letter “I,” and an image of
the subject both as a thinking consciousness and as a physical body.
Even the epistemological questions raised by the show remained rooted
in an aesthetic confrontation with the work.7 The viewer was provoked
not only to think, but also to suffer frustrations, to laugh with
surprise, to marvel at the indeterminacy in the work, and, perhaps
most importantly, to look again. Rather than a philosopher, Zheng
acted like an illusionist. He orchestrated deceptions, pierced the
veil of these deceptions, and left the viewer wondering which of the
two to believe, the illusion or the truth offered to explain it away
– Chuang Tzu or the butterfly. Contrary to the cold abstractions
of philosophical epistemology, the show inspired an aesthetic contemplation,
which as philosophy might better be compared to religious wonder.
And, rather than a scientist, Zheng occupied a position as an artist
somewhere between a sage and a sideshow barker.8
So what are we to make of this persistence of aesthetic enjoyment
in Zheng’s otherwise conceptual art? And specifically, within
the framework of this essay, as defining the “conceptual”
in the “post-conceptual?” A proper response to this question
would require a deeper historical study of conceptual art as it has
appeared and re-appeared since the 20’s. One would need to examine
the dynamics between ideas and aesthetic enjoyments at each of these
moments, and consider broader trends in art, ideology, and politics,
since then. However, it seems clear that for Zheng attention to concepts
in art does not require disrupting what Sol Lewitt describes as “the
expectation of an emotional kick, to which one conditioned to expressionist
art is accustomed.” Zheng relishes in aesthetic enjoyment as
integral to his conceptual concerns.
Does this persistence of the aesthetic then imply that the ‘post-conceptual’
has left behind the self-consciousness of conceptual art? Did conceptual
art exhaust the critical resources of modernism and open the door
to mere spectacle, as I have argued above about aspects of Mathew
Barney’s work? As The Butterfly Said To Chuang Tzu does not
resolve these questions. However the show offers three distinct models
for understanding the dynamics between of ideas and aesthetics in
contemporary art. These models are, to my mind, embodied in the remaining
pieces from the show, as variations on the experience of wonder.
1. The first is indeed wonder as spectacle, presented by what were,
to my mind, the weakest pieces from the show. To make “The
Knob,” Zheng wrapped a piece of reflective mylar tape in
a circle around a screw in the wall. The piece offered little more
than a cheap illusion: is it in fact a knob or merely a screw with
a piece of mylar wrapped around it? One’s answer depended only
on the degree of one’s willingness or desire to suspend disbelief.
In “ONO YES,” Zheng employed the same mylar tape,
placing it in circles over pieces of square paper on which he had
written the letters O-N-O-Y-E-S, in reference to Yoko Ono’s
“Yes.” The play between the letters as words
and shapes added a complexity to this work, but the historical reference
ultimately undermined any tension it provided. Once you had read the
words properly, it was clear what it meant: Zheng was situating himself
in relationship to Fluxus and, as such, reassuring the audience that
this was art, despite the questions raised by other work in the show.
One either knew the reference, read the words, and ‘got it,’
or didn’t. And, for “Seeds” Zheng planted
seeds in three pots with instruction to viewers to water each of them
with distinct intentions: encouraging, discouraging, and neutral.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of a recent study of prayer
and its failure to aid recovering patients. The piece played with
questions of faith that are currently too politically charged to take
lightly. And again, the force of the work depended only on the degree
of the viewer’s critical self-consciousness or need to believe.
In these three pieces, wonder was aestheticized as mere spectacle:
one was free to wonder in the reassurance that the questions raised
had already been answered or hadn’t been seriously posed at
all. This wonder belongs to the mystic and the charlatan as well as
much post-conceptual art.
2. “The Blind,” on the other hand, expressed
wonder as anxiety. Zheng hung a beat-up Venetian blind on the long
wall of the gallery. The viewer could not help but worry what was
behind the blind, despite recognizing the absurdity of the question:
there was nothing but a wall. The blind created what it concealed
by concealing it. And this sense of the hidden, called attention to
the psychological desire to know. As the sun set, shadows from the
sign in the window were cast across the surface of the blind. What
was inside? What was outside? The piece reminded me of film noir.
And the phenomenological play of presence and absence seemed to be
invested with the sense that something was wrong, and needed to be
resolved. It expressed ambivalence, more than indeterminacy, and seemed
to be riddled by guilt and desire.
3. “As Is” in turn expressed wonder as social
tension. Zheng hung a microphone out the gallery window, which channeled
the sound of the street into speakers set on the floor at the other
end of the room. The sound was beautiful, abstracted from its context,
and the piece was successful simply as a composition. The echo of
the street in the gallery was disorienting and one couldn’t
help but question not only what one was hearing, but also where one
stood. The piece raised phenomenological questions about framing akin
to those addressed by “The Wall,” and “The
Big I.” Was the gallery the frame for the sound of the
street or the street the frame for the gallery? However, in this piece,
the uncertainty took on a decidedly political tone. The question of
the frame entailed considerations of class, ideology, education, work
and leisure, calling attention to the social relations that inform
aesthetic enjoyments as well as the aesthetics that inform social
relations. How were these spaces distinguished? Who is included and
who is excluded?
As The Butterfly Said To Chuang Tzu raised epistemological
questions through aesthetic encounters and engendered a phenomenological
sense of wonder about the nature of experience. It not only posed
questions, it provoked them as affectively, psychologically, and socially
loaded. And, though it did not categorically clarify the dynamics
between ideas and aesthetic enjoyment in contemporary art, it articulated
vivid models for further investigation.
Notes:
1 Arthur Danto, “Art After the End of Art,”
in The Wake of Art, ed. Horowitz and Huhn, p.122. My example paraphrases
one provided by Allan Kaprow in “The Education of an Un-Artist.”
2 Roberta Smith explains the connection between minimalism and the
origins of conceptual art:. She writes, “Minimalism itself had
aspired to be completely logical. Yet it was also the first art movement
to be ‘formalist’ and Duchampian in equal parts. It achieved
pure, abstract, often classically beautiful form via a preconceived
intellectual approach, which made extensive use of various ‘readymades’:
mathematical systems (used to determine composition), geometric forms,
un-manipulated industrial materials and factory fabrication (which
removed the artist from the actual construction of the object). Minimalism
reinforced the idea of progress in art, which verged on the scientific
and likewise of an art which moved forward by appropriating methods
and ideas from other disciplines and areas of knowledge. Also Minimalism’s
severe reduction did not leave younger artists, instilled with this
idea of progress, much to do in the formal arena: this too helped
push them towards what seemed to be the next logical step –
the elimination, or at least de-emphasis, of the object, and the use
of language, knowledge, mathematics and the facts of the world in
and of themselves.” From “Conceptual Art,”
in Concepts of Modern Art, ed. by Nikos Stangos, p.262
3 Sol Lewitt would seem to give support to this idea, at least concerning
conceptual art, when he writes, “What the work of art looks
like isn’t too important. It has to look like something if it
has a physical form . No matter what form it may finally have, it
must begin with an idea,” and later, “Ideas may stated
with numbers, photographs, or words or anyway the artist chooses,
the form being unimportant.” However, he’s also careful
to add, “conceptual art doesn’t really have much to do
with mathematics, philosophy, or any other mental discipline.”
Sol Lewitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” in
Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alberro and Stimson,
pp. 13 - 15
4 Kant writes, “By an aesthetic idea I mean a presentation of
the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate
thought whatsoever, i.e., no [determinate] concept, can be adequate,
so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp
it.” The Critque of Judgment, p.182
5 In the pluralism of contemporary art, Danto argues, art history
ends along with the dissolution of the autonomous work of art. And
avant-gardism gives way to the repetition of diverse forms, as all
now equally “possible.” In this light, the topic of my
paper might be reformulated as a study in the repetition of conceptual
art: how does it function now?
6 Analogously Dan Graham explains the origins of his own involvement
with conceptual art as a questioning the relationship between the
value of art and the gallery itself. He celebrates this exploration
in the pieces by Dan Flavin, which use the gallery’s fluorescent
lights as their medium (whether or not this was Flavin’s intention),
and sees them as solving a problem he had with Duchamp’s model
of conceptual art. He writes, “By contrast Flavin’s fluorescent
light pieces are not merely a priori philosophical idealizations,
but have concrete relations to specific details of the architectural
arrangement of the gallery, details which produce meaning.”
Dan Graham, “My Works For Magazines: a history of conceptual
art,” in Conceputal Art: A Critical Anthology,
ed. by Alberro and Stimson, p.42
7 Lucy Lippard notes, “Dematerialized art is post-aesthetic
only in its increasingly non-visual emphasis. The aesthetic of principle
is still an aesthetic.” ,” From “The Dematerialized
Object of Art” in Conceputal Art: A Critical Anthology,
ed. by Alberro and Stimson, p.48
8 Sol Lewitt writes, “Conceptual artists are mystic rather than
rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.”
From “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” in Conceputal
Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Alberro and Stimson, p.48
9 Like John Cage’s 4:33
Clark Buckner works as the gallery director at MISSION
17, and currently teaches courses on video, contemporary art, and
critical theory at Mills College, and The San Francisco Art Institute.This
essay was also presented at the conference “Visual Intelligence
and the Sense of Art” at Cal State Stanislaus; an interdisciplinary
faculty seminar at Mills College, Oakland, 2006; and “Canadian
Society for Aesthetics,” in Saskatoon, Sasketchewan, 2007.
