Theory Materialized: Conceptual Art and its Others

Pedro Erber

diacritics, Volume 36, Number 1, Spring 2006, pp. 3-12 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/dia.2008.0007

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/summary/v036/36.1erber.html

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THEORY MATERIALIZED
PEDRO ERBER

Conceptual art and its others

Ernst van Alphen. Art in Mind: how contemporary images shape thought. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Mieke Bal. Louise Bourgeois Spider: the architecture of art-writing. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. W. J. T. Mitchell. What do pictures want? the lives and loves of images. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. What would the object be then? A new category, or a new mode of being of the aesthetic proposition? As I see it, while possessing also these two meanings, the most important proposition of the object, of the object-makers, would be that of a new perceptive behavior, created through an increasingly higher level of spectator participation, leading to the overcoming of the object itself as the end of aesthetic expression. For me, in my evolution, the object was a passage to experiences increasingly committed to the individual behavior of each participator. I want to stress that it is not a matter of searching for a new conditioning for the participator, but rather a tearing down of all conditioning in view of the search for individual freedom, through increasingly open propositions . . . what Mrio Pedrosa prophetically defined as the experimental exercise of freedom. Hlio Oiticica, Emergence of the Supra-sensorial in Brazilian Art (December 1967) We usually think of a urinal as something whose sole mission is to receive our urine and conduct it to the sewage. Duchamp stripped us from our intrinsic power as managers and rulers of the urinal, thus setting it free, and consequently filling up with freedom also his own head. The title objet was born under this condition of reciprocal liberation. Akasegawa Genpei, The objet after Stalin (October 1967) How can visually perceived objects, and more specifically those characterized as works of art, interfere in the way we think? How can an object, image or picture propose its own theory? How can art trigger a liberating process in our relationship to both art itself and things in general? How can it become what the Brazilian art critic Mrio Pedrosa termed an experimental exercise of freedom? A certain understanding of these questions grounds a large part of the artistic production of the twentieth centuryand not solely that which is usually referred to as conceptual art. As a matter of fact, different definitions of conceptual art and conceptualism can be said to follow a decision within the range of possible answers to such questions. A response to those questions lies also at the core of each of the three books discussed in this article. In W. J. T. Mitchells What Do Pictures Want?, as in Ernst van Alphens Art in Mind and Mieke Bals Louise Bourgeois Spider, the relationship between conceptual or theoretical thought and our experience of materiality is repeatedly called into question. While

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inhabiting this ambiguous space between concept and materiality, these books dwell on one attempt of translation. Translation from a linguistic, conceptual realm into the materiality of thingsand vice versais both discussed and performed in a number of different, sometimes mutually contradictory, ways. And, in fact, the very problem of the mode of being of a conceptual element within the so-called visual or plastic arts can be described as a matter of translation. A translational process is always at stake in both the production and perception ofor interaction withworks of art. So-called conceptual art, which reinforces the role of the concept within the art object to the point of advertising its dematerialization [see Lippard and Chandler], is only one example of this relationship, and one among other modalities of translation between concept and materiality within the work of art. Almost explicitly avoiding the issue of conceptual artbut indirectly challenging it through and throughBal refers to the theoretical character of certain works of art which are capable of transforming our own relationship to art. Theoretical objects, according to Bal, cannot be straightforwardly explained and translated into conceptual discourse, description, or narrative. But the repeated attempt at such translation is nevertheless pointed out as the fundamental task of art-writing, which should let itself be molded and guided by its objects. Van Alphen, who refers only in passing to the notion of theoretical objects but implicitly subscribes to it throughout his book, centers his argument on a certain understanding of the aesthetic experience, appropriated from Theodor Adorno and Christoph Menke, in order to describe the way artworks influence our thought. The question takes a very different shape within Mitchells recent book What Do Pictures Want? While sharing with Bal and van Alphen the claim that visually perceived (nontextual) objects are able to address to us their theoretical claims, the mode of visual perception at stake in his notion of pictures is of an entirely different order from the sort of cognitive relationship at stake in Bals and van Alphens approaches to art. 1 Theorizing Pictures, Picturing Theory Mitchells What Do Pictures Want? elaborates a theory of pictures: not simply pictures in their narrowest sense, as those familiar objects we see hanging on walls, pasted into photo albums [xiii], but as a fundamental mechanism of our relationship to reality. Going even further, Mitchell proposes to understand the entity he calls the picture as a universal, perennial, and inescapable mode of human understanding. Mitchell formulates his central claim against the background of Heideggers description of our time as an epoch of the world picture [qtd. in Mitchell xiv]. He opposes Heideggers historical take on the matter by stating that pictures, including world pictures, have always been with us, and there is no getting beyond pictures, much less world pictures, to a more authentic relationship with Being, with the Real, or with the World [xiv]. While Heidegger is said to have thought the pictorial character of our understanding as the result of a historical transformation equivalent to the advent of modernity, thus hoping for an epoch beyond modernity and beyond the world as picture [xiv], Mitchell asserts the utter impossibility of overcoming the ubiquity of pictorial thinking. Not only have pictures always been with us, but they are also everywhere, leaving us no alternative mode of relationship to reality. The book breaks down the structure of pictures into three basic elements, each of them corresponding to one of its major sections. The first of these elements is the image, by which is meant any likeness, figure, motif, or form that appears in some medium or other [xiii]. Image is thus the least material, least concrete component of a picturethat 

which could arguably be said not to exist independently of subjective perception. The second section focuses on objects, defined in a twofold manner, as the material support in or on which an image appears or the material thing that an image refers to or brings into view [xiii]. And the books third section discusses media, understanding by medium the set of material practices that brings an image together with an object to produce a picture [xiii]. Any picture invariably possesses all of these three basic components. Even what Mitchell refers to as thought images, for instance, purportedly exist within a certain medium, namely, the human mind. Moreover, our most abstract thoughts are necessarily embedded in words, images, harmonic sounds, or some other sort of material practice. The consequences of the scheme depicted by Mitchell to the relationship between theory and visualitywidely discussed already in his earlier volume Picture Theory (1994)are particularly relevant. His methodological strategy, described as picturing theoryby which he means the treatment of theory as an embodied discourse, one that is constructed around critical metaphors, analogies, models, figures, cases and scenes enables the text to pose the capital question concerning what the medium of theory itself might be [209]. In other words, it enables him to regard theory as inevitably embedded in a medium, contrary to the common assumption that some form of critical or philosophical language, the metalanguage of systems theory or semiotics, for instance, might lift us out of the welter of media and give us a neutral scientific perspective on the totality of media [209]. No theory is thus totally independent of a medium, free of mediation, immediate. A philosophical text is no less dependent on its medium than is an oil painting or a TV commercial. The developments of this fundamental assertion for the practice of visual studies are twofold. On the one hand, the absence and impossibility of immediate or unmediated theory leads Mitchell to propose the elaboration of what he calls forms of vernacular theory, embedded in different media practices [216]. But, most importantly, such a state of things heralds the possibility of an approach to pictures themselves as forms of theorizing [6], that is, of looking at pictures not merely as objects over which to impose a certain theory brought in from outside, but as beholders of their own theoretical positions and propositions. This attitude constitutes the core of Mitchells approach to visual culture, according to which pictures come to play the role of both the object and subject of visual studies. As he observes about his earlier book: Rather than relying on a preexisting theory, method, or discourse to explain pictures, I wanted to let them speak for themselves. Starting from metapictures, or pictures that reflect on the process of pictorial representation itself, I wanted to study pictures themselves as forms of theorizing. The aim, in short, was to picture theory, not to import a theory of pictures from somewhere else [6]. A development of this attempt can be observed in What Do Pictures Want?, whose approach to visuality liberates pictures from theories imposed from the outside, while suggesting the possibility of considering pictures themselves as important sources of theoretical insight, rather than as mere objects of analysis. However, it is also necessary to point out the limits imposed by such a notion of picture as a determination of our visual experience of works of art, of things in general, and of reality at large. Precisely because it embraces a totality [xvii], a picture enables and ensures the cohesion of visual experience, thus facilitating cognition, and simultaneously preserving the subjects structural unity. To get the picture, Mitchell writes, is to get a comprehensive, global view of the situation; or else, to take a snapshot at a specific moment [xvii]. In any case, pictures work by encapsulating reality within a frame, and thus keeping it under controleven when (as Mitchell argues through one of Barbara Krugers pieces) we ourselves are locked inside this picture, that is, even when we see ourselves as standing within the limits of this frame [xvi]. Pictures as understood by Mitchell are thus directly related to representation. Not only in the case of pictorial repdiacritics / spring 2006 

resentations, but even when a representation is discursively produced, through description or narrative, the picture constitutes our way of dealing with it. In Mitchells words, history and anthropology, for instance, are not just descriptions of events and practices but of representations of events and practices. Pictures are our way of gaining access to whatever these things are [xiv]. The picture as a fundamental mode of human understanding is hence at work not only in relation to things of which we have immediate visual experience, but also to any object that we could possibly fit into a picture. From such a perspective, translation between different media can be thought as a mere transposition of pictures from one medium to the other. And even if, according to their particularities, different media might be more or less apt to produce (or reproduce) a certain picture, translation happens here as a fundamentally unproblematic process, owing to the role of pictures as a sort of universal language. However, since not every aspect of reality can be accurately depicted, there is always a certain element that escapes the pictorial embrace. The impossibility of dealing with such an element is the insurmountable limit of Mitchells model of pictorial thinking. The notion of picture thus conceived is unable to account for nonrepresentable forms of visual experience, a problem that becomes all the more noticeable from the perspective of the limited role played by objects within Mitchells conceptual framework. As the material support in or on which an image appears, or the material thing that an image refers to or brings into view, objects are taken into account only as an element in the structural constitution of pictures, and therefore not in their full potentiality as objects. In that sense, Mitchell argues, [i]t should be clear that if there are no images without objects (as material support or referential target), there are no objects without images [108]. Materiality itself is reduced to the role of a mere support of images, and thus overlooked in its most fundamental character. Mitchells model of pictorial thinking fails to account for the fact that objects are also something beyond the material support of pictures, and something more than what a picture can bring into view. While modernly conceivedin relation to a perceiving subjectobjects cannot be thought beyond that which either carries an image or which can be referred by it. On the other hand, as even Kant made clear, such a conception of the object necessarily leaves a rest, which escapes subjective perception. And the very idea of a thing in itself is designed to address precisely that x which, albeit not objectively perceived, still does not cease to be there and make itself present in some way. It is precisely this unrepresentable aspect of the object, and more specifically of some objects of art, which does not cease to be there and to demand translation but at the same time does not cease to resist itwhat Bal and van Alphen envisage as arts characteristic mode of thinking, articulated through the idea of a theoretical object. 2 Theoretical Objects In a parallel move to Mitchells proposal to deal with pictures as forms of theorizing, Bals analysis of Louise Bourgeoiss Spider performatively demonstrates that a rigorous approach to certain works of art must ultimately derive its theoretical framework from the works themselves. She borrows and develops French art-historian Hubert Damischs notion of a theoretical object1 to refer to such artworks that possess the intrinsic capacity to interfere in and transform the very way we look at art: a theoretically strong work
1. Bal mentions a debate between Hubert Damisch and Louis Marin in the late 1980s as the earliest source for her notion of theoretical object [cf. 5n5].

of art (one that proposes its own theory) has something to contribute to the way we look at artat this particular object, at others like it, at art in general [xix]. Simultaneously, through a close, in-depth reading of a single installation, Louise Bourgeois Spider elaborates a methodological reflection on the practice of art-writing as such, its possibilities, constraints, and strategies. In a way that resonates with Mitchells attempt to let pictures speak for themselves, Bals methodologyor attitude, as she prefers to call itconsists fundamentally in putting the art first and following its demands for the adequate analytical strategy. The phenomenological mood of Bals attachment to the very surface of Bourgeoiss work, her discursive attempt to construct an interpretive discourse within its corners and slits performatively pay homage to the very ethos of the spider, of Spider as an installation, and of Bourgeoiss insistent engagement with the theme. A certain notion of architecture permeates Bals approach to Bourgeoiss pieces: From the series or genre works called Femme-Maison, which explores the relationship between body and building, to the overtly built Cells, the architectural is present in Bourgeois art. Present, but never straightforward, and never alone [1]. Primarily defined as a sculpture or installation, Spider is said to encompass the architectural through the mediation of a rather unexpected element: narrative. According to Bal, architecture is present in Spider as a solution or meeting point for the paradox inherent in the relationship between visual art and narrative [2]. Architecture comes in where (or when) narrative fails or simply stops. But narrative is simultaneously itself a function of Bourgeois architecture [2]. The architectural in Spider solicits, yet resists, a narrative approach [4]. This unusual entanglement of architecture and discursiveness, suggested already in the books subtitle (The Architecture of Art-Writing), articulates Bals perception of the relationship between concept and materiality within Bourgeoiss work. Somehow confirming the deep resonance of such approach with Benjamins attempt at reading the materiality of the Parisian passages and his own engagement with architecture as an object of philosophical inquiry, Bal titles one of the books last chapters Passages through Modern Sculpture [107]. Description and its counterpart in narrative as two discursive manners of drawing a picture of a certain object or event are not only performed but also recurrently thematized within Bals analysis. Yet what seems to interest her the most about those discursive modes in relation to Spider is the moment in which the object itself is said to resist the narrative and descriptive approaches: Through the need to experience the temporality of looking, the narratives that turn this particular Cell into a house also slam the door on the viewer trying to read the stories. Her stories of the past stick to our stories of looking, but they remain opaque. This is an important moment: the theoretical object declares war on narrative [2728]. The theoretical object shows itself as such precisely by slamming the door on the viewer trying to read the stories, that is, on those attempting to translate it into a narrative discourse. One of the crucial meanings of the Cells as theoretical objects is to resist translation [77]. Theory is thus portrayed as a mode of resistance, resistance against our explanatory attempts, that is, against the urge to translate and thus domesticate the foreign and unknown into a familiar language. By resisting such attempts, the theoretical object is able to trigger a transformation in the way we look at art, and ultimately at reality at large. Albeit not as prominently as in Bals monograph, the notion of artworks as theoretical objects lies also in the background of van Alphens approach to a wide range of art objects, literary works, and performance pieces. His essays compiled in the recent volume Art in Mind argue for the power of art to transform the ways in which cultural issues are conceived in contemporary society. Art is a laboratory, he writes, where experiments are conducted that shape thought into visual and imaginative ways of framing the pain points of a culture [xiii]. The conceptual affinities with Bals analysis of Spider can be traced from the outset, as the book departs from an exposition of Damischs philodiacritics / spring 2006 

sophical analyses of Renaissance art, which advances the basic theoretical claim that art thinks. The chapters that follow analyze concrete examples of arts specific way of thinking in relation to particularly sensitive issues (what van Alphen calls pain points) in modern culture and society, such as individuality, identity, sexuality, and trauma. Chapter TwoThe Portraits Dispersalfor instance, starts by describing the birth of the portrait genre as a factor in the rise of individualism in order to further discuss the ways in which contemporary art has been using portraiture as a powerful tool to criticize what he terms the darker side of individualism in our societies. In a somewhat less intellectual fashion then the beginning of the book, as the author claims, Chapters FiveThe Homosocial Gazeand SixMen without Ballsfocus on masculinity, homosociality, and demasculinization, through the lens of novelist Ian McEwan and Mathew Barneys performances, among others. A critical analysis of the notion of history, and of arts performative role within it, articulates van Alphens argument, informing also the books division in three main parts: Exposing History, Rewriting History, and Working through History. Like Bal, van Alphen intermingles his analyses of individual artworks with a thorough critique of the established discourses of art history, literary studies, and aesthetics. As he points out, traditional academic disciplines seem unable to put in practice the (otherwise widely accepted) performative conception of art, and thus constantly displace the agency of art to the historical period or figure from which it stems [xiii]. Although by no means a novel conception, as he points out, the understanding of art as a historical agent rather than a mere product is not acknowledged or reflected in those scholarly disciplines that focus on artworks or literary texts professionally: art history and literary studies [xiii]. Against such traditional approaches, he advocates the interdisciplinary efforts of cultural and visual studies, in which he sees the conferral of a deeper historicity on art, beyond the narrow art-historical framework. The theoretical object emerges in the fourth chapter of van Alphens book, The Representation of Space and the Space of Representation, materialized as a Steel Fence piece by Dutch artist Marien Schouten. Like Bal, he resorts to the term precisely at the moment in which Schoutens installation is said to resist the writers explanatory attempt: Importantly for the thesis underlying this bookthat art thinks in historythe object here resists what I am trying to do with it. . . . I will try to resolve this tension between a historically grounded theory and a concretely apparent counterexample by reading the latter as a theoretical object that has a point to make in this classical theoretical debate [92]. As historical agents rather then mere products, theoretical objects counter historically based theories and expectations about them, thus demanding a transformation in the interpretive approach itself. In this way, they are said to embody their own theory, but this theory is not immediately translatable into conceptual discourse. Art thinks, but it thinks aesthetically. The notion of aesthetic experience and its differentiation from positive, rational understanding, taken up from Christoph Menkes interpretation of Adornos aesthetics, constitutes the core of van Alphens conception of the theoretical object and is an important trait of his approach to artworks in general. Their basic claim lies in the essentially negative character of the aesthetic experience, in the sense that it implies a fundamental negation of the subjects initial attempt to understand. This happens because, in contrast to positive, nonaesthetic understanding, which is determined by rules and is thus automatic and unproblematic, aesthetic experience is characterized by a lack of the basic rules that enable the identification of meaning in a given object [xv]. In Menkes words, every effort to answer the question as to what an aesthetic object might mean is confronted by the even more basic question of what, if anything, in this object signifies [Menke 34; qtd. in van Alphen xv]. In the case of the written word, for instance, set rules dictate which aspects of the image at stake are supposed to be taken as meaningful, yet when confronted 

with art objects, the spectator is guided by no such rules. The attempt at understanding is thus negated, barred by the absence of a clear determination of what in a certain work should be taken as meaningful or significant. According to Menke, the essentially negative character of aesthetic experience, the impossibility of straightforward understanding, is what forms the basis for what is commonly referred to as aesthetic pleasure. Aesthetic negativity, he claims, has to be understood as the structural principle for that process of aesthetic experience the immanent reflection of which engenders pleasure [Menke 26]. An implicit reference to such a mechanism can be read in the following comment by van Alphen on Damischs Theory of /Cloud/: The attraction of works of art now consists in a kind of visual epistemology: they are able to make present that which withdraws from our cognitive power [89]. The visual epistemology referred to here as embedded in art objects does not help us reach knowledge in the usual sense of the word. According to van Alphen, what we get from art is rather an access to that which is unknowable, unformed, and even visually unrepresentable [89]. Our attraction to artworks and the pleasure we derive from them is thus dissociated from an immediate connection to a notion of beauty and attributed to the realm of (negated) understanding. What here is still called pleasure comes to look more like a type of jouissance, provoked by the castration of the intellectual impetus of making sense of the work of art. The impossibility of establishing the locus of meaning within an artworkthe fact that each and all of its aspects and characteristics might be considered as meaningful points to the phenomenon encountered by Bal through the inability of a single discursive approach to entirely make sense of Bourgeoiss installation. Her analysis of Spider reveals the works demand for a sort of experimental critique, which, departing from the materiality of the object itself, tries out different approachesnot in order to find the right theory which could be imposed upon the object, but rather as a process of negotiation, through which the range of possible meanings of the work gradually comes to light. The experimental quality of such critique is in its turn a response to the experimental character of artistic production itself, as a determination of the mode of its relationship with materiality as a source of significance, rather than as mere raw material for the production of something predetermined by the artist as the subject of artistic expression. A liberation of the signifying potential of materiality is thus operated. The liberation that takes place in the production of the work of art finds a particularly cogent description in the following remark by the Japanese avant-garde artist Akasegawa Genpei on Fountain, Duchamps 1917 ready-made. In an essay bearing the suggestive title The Objet after Stalin, Akasegawa humorously observes that while we usually think of a urinal as something whose sole mission is to receive our urine and conduct it to the sewage, by displacing the urinal into the art museum, Duchamp stripped us from our intrinsic power as managers and rulers of the urinal, thus setting it free. [Akasegawa 69]. According to Akasegawa, this mere displacementwhich amounts to the production of the ready-madereveals the essence of artistic creation as an act of liberation of the object. Contrarily to tools, which have a previously established function dictated by the subject, the object as artwork is set free to autonomously deploy its signifying potential. This indeterminate and inexhaustible signifying potential of the artwork constitutes the theoretical character of what Bal and van Alphen refer to as a theoretical object. 3 Materiality in Translation: Conceptual Art and Its Others The three authors converge in a strong claim concerning the potential of theory embodied in media not primarily reliant on writing and speech. But, among them, two very different diacritics / spring 2006 

conceptions of the mode of being of such mediaor objectsand of our relationship to them are at stake. Mitchell denies any possibility of a relationship to objects independent of the mediation of pictures. A picture, he claims, is a very peculiar and paradoxical creature, both concrete and abstract, both an individual thing and a symbolic form that embraces a totality [xvii]. However, instead of the notion of a paradoxical creature able to be both concrete and abstract at the same time, what is conveyed throughout the book is the sense of a split between two irreducibly different meanings of the word picture, whose unity is conferred solely by their common designation. Pictures appear at times as concretely existing entities, with their lives and lovesas in chapter 2, What Do Pictures Want?while in other instances they are taken as a ubiquitous mechanism that mediates our relationship to reality, as announced already in the books preface. Albeit deeply related, those two meanings do not constitute a unity. Certainly, our very ability to think pictorially is on the basis of the human ability to draw, paint, or produce pictures in whatever way. But even such pictures, when actually produced, acquire qualities that escape our pictorial representation of them, and thus cannot be subsumed under the totality of a mental picture. What determines this fundamental fracture between the two meanings of picture is nothing other than the intervention of materiality. The material character of objects and media, recognized by Mitchell as an inherent component in the structure of pictures, makes them irreducible to pure representations. In Bal and van Alphens approaches to art it is precisely this aspect of an artwork that escapes representation that is identified as the objects theoretical element. Not by chance, What Do Pictures Want? harshly criticizes the surrealist notion of the found object, denouncing the inability of its defendants to come up with a sufficient theoretical framework to back it up. Mitchell cites Hal Fosters discussion of the found object in terms of a return of the repressed [Foster 4448, Mitchell 113] only to categorically dismiss it as farcical and tragic [124]. The reduction of the process of artistic production that takes place in the surrealist conception of the found object implies a fundamental critique to modern objectivity. Very much like Mitchells pictures, an object, by definition, exists only in relation to a perceiving subject. The surrealist found object, on the other hand, is, in a certain sense, already there before being found by the subject. The artists role is to recognize it and, by this act, to let it be that which it already was in potential but could not entirely become. Akasegawa appropriates the surrealist conception of the object and develops it into his interpretation of Duchamps ready-made, making it also the theoretical touchstone of his own artistic production during the 1960s. The urinal, he claims, must be first liberated from its usual function in the bathroom, from our subjective control over it as a tool, in order to attain its full potential as an objet. Quite significantly, by setting the urinal free, Akasegawa adds, Duchamp consequently fills up with freedom also his own head. The title objet was born under this condition of reciprocal liberation [Akasegawa 69]. What Akasegawa envisages in the production of the ready-made is thus most of all this dynamics of reciprocal liberation through art. The subject is liberated by letting materiality itself be what it is: in Oiticicas words, it is a tearing down of all conditioning in view of the search for individual freedom, through increasingly open propositions [Emergence 102]. An entirely different conception of freedom in relation to art-making can be traced in Joseph Kosuths notion of art as idea, and Seth Siegelaubs claim that [a]rtists have finally been accepted as idea men and not merely craftsmen with poetic thoughts [qtd. in Alberro, Conceptual Art 152]. Idea and craftsmanship are perceived here as dichotomically opposed moments in the process of artistic production. At the same time, craftsmen are implicitly reduced to a lower status, above which artists are raised in the exact moment they leave materiality behind. Art as idea waves thus with the promise of the artists liberation from the constraints of materiality. It implies far more than mere em10

phasis on the concepts role and relevance within the art object. It is an utter rejection of arts material character, and, in this way, the attempt of an absolute purification of art. In Kosuths clear-cut style: The art is the idea; the idea is the art [Last Word in Graphic Style 26, qtd. in Alberro, Conceptual Art 39]. Materiality might still be there, but it doesnt matter anymore: the physical materials or objects that come along with the idea are no more the art than a truck which carries a work of art from a studio to a gallery is a work of art [39]. From then on, as Lucy Lippard and John Chandler put it, the object becomes obsolete [49]. Even when it is constructed or exhibited, it is no longer recognized as an inherent part of the art itself. As opposed to a liberation of the subject through a liberation of materiality, what we see here is the attempt of a straightforward liberation from materiality, through its elimination from the process of artistic production. Lippard and Chandlers paradigmatic description of the process of dematerialization of art is often identified with the development of conceptual art in general. Yet the accuracy of such identification obviously depends on how encompassing a meaning one attributes to the notion of conceptual art itself. Alexander Alberro, for instance, who follows a rather narrow definition of the term in Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, by identifying it with the production of artists who, like Kosuth himself, gathered around the conceptual art dealer and producer Seth Siegelaub in 1960s New York City, takes the notion in a much broader sense in the earlier volume Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. In his introductory essay to the Critical Anthology, Alberro proposes, as the broadest possible definition of the conceptual element in art, an expanded critique of the cohesiveness and materiality of the art object, a growing wariness toward definitions of artistic practice as purely visual, a fusion of the work with its site and context of display, and an increased emphasis on the possibilities of publicness and distribution [xvii]. Even among the very texts and theories included in the anthology, a wide range of paths for the development of such a conceptual element in art can be perceived, some of which take a very different, sometimes opposed direction to the one that leads to a dematerialization of art. One such example can be found in two fragments by the Brazilian avant-garde artist Hlio Oiticica. Within his artistic production, the conceptual element is articulated through a radical transformation of objectivity itself. Spectator participationleitmotif of Oiticicas artistic path and fundamental theme of his theoretical writingsbecomes a key for the development of noncontemplative modes of relationship to art. The object is no longer taken as final product and goal of artistic activity; its role becomes fundamentally that of an invitation to creative participatory activity by the public. As such invitational propositions, objects must be there as themselves: not merely as the embodiment of a fixed concept of idea by the artist, which would necessarily close off and condition the range of possibilities of participation. Oiticicas series of mobile, wearable sculptures called Parangols (1964) and the environmental installation Tropiclia (1966) remain cogent examples of this artistic-theoretical search for what he termed a new objectivity [General Scheme 40]. The notion of theoretical objects, as exposed and manipulated by Bal and van Alphen, characterizes an approach to artworks remarkably akin to Oiticicas proposal of a new objectivity. Contrary to the process of dematerialization, it is in both cases a matter of objects which are not conceptual as opposed to material, but conceptual in their very materiality [Bal 84]. Materiality becomes the source of a renewed relationship to art, no longer exclusively dependent on visuality, but not opposed to visuality as such. In fact, theory itself has long been thought of as a transformed mode of sight or visuality. Likewise, theoretical objects propose a thorough transformation of visuality into a participatory act, thus blurring its borders with other forms of sensorial experience. Like the television monitors mouth in David Cronenbergs Videodrome [see Mitchell xv, 217],

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theoretical objects seduce the spectator into a relationship far beyond mere contemplation. Art-writing, while performed as a response to the art objects wink that seductively demands yet resists translation, is itself a mode of spectator participation. Conversely, the making of objects of art can be thought of as an attempt to materially translate something that resists conceptual expressivity. In opposition to Kosuths claim that the unsaid is unsaid because its unsayable [Art after Philosophy 159], Bal remarks: If the subject could just say it, what would be the point of making art, of saying it through art? [Bal 39]. But translation in this sense can no longer be understood on the basis of a relationship of correspondence between two clearly defined and separate realms of significance, or languages. Missing here is not only correspondence itself, but also its condition of possibility, that is, a clear division between conceptual and material realms, artistic and theoretical production, and other such dichotomies categorically rejected [Bal 50] by the very works of art in question. Instead of corresponding, the kind of translation at stake here might be more accurately conceived of as responding to the claim of that which demandsand simultaneously resiststranslation. And precisely by incorporating resistance as an inherent condition, such translation abdicates all pretension to act as a substitute for the original. Instead, it must constantly refer back to an original, or origin, itself never completely exhausted in translation. In its turn, the languageor dialectof such translation does not conceive of itself as entirely foreign to the one it attempts to translate. Such translation adapts itself to its objects, framing and transforming itself in accordance, thus constructing, as art and theory, an inhabitable place for thought in the intersection of concept and materiality. WORKS CITED Akasegawa, Genpei. Stalin ik no obuje [The objet after Stalin]. Obuje o motta musansha [An objet-carrying Proletarian]. Tokyo: Gendai Shichsha, 1970. Alberro, Alexander. Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity. Cambridge: MIT P, 2003. ________ . Reconsidering Conceptual Art, 19661977. Alberro and Stimson xvixxxvii. Alberro, Alexander, and Blake Stimson. Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. Cambridge: MIT P, 1999. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. Damisch, Hubert. A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. Foster, Hal. Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge: MIT P, 1993. Heidegger, Martin. The Age of the World Picture. The Question Concerning Technology. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. 11654. Kosuth, Joseph. Art after Philosophy. Alberro and Stimson 15877. ________ . The Last Word in Graphic Art. Art International 12.9 (1968): 2528. Lippard, Lucy, and John Chandler. The Dematerialization of Art. Alberro and Stimson 4651. Menke, Christoph. The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida. Trans. Neil Solomon. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Oiticica, Hlio. Aparecimento do supra-sensorial na arte brasileira [Emergence of the Supra-sensorial in Brazilian Art]. Aspiro ao grande labirinto. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1986. ________ . General Scheme of the New Objectivity. Alberro and Stimson 4045. 12