Page 44 - Studio International - January 1970

Status whether traditional aesthetics rests on a mis- essentialism : in fact it is a scarcely intelligible
take.3 one anyway in this context. The point is that
and priority It might be helpful to look at the work fairly one can get to the essentialist position on
blandly, trying to sort out a chronology,4 so
purely extensional principles. (And this is
long as this does not invest theory with his- where you get to a Hobbesian tautology—
toricisms. The work under consideration, which is irrelevant.)
Terry Atkinson though theoretically fertile, does not invite More recent work has (built-in) seen the re-
Michael Baldwin ready idiosyncratic generalization. habilitation of some funny de re modalities,
It seems that there is a body of assertion in the but this does not lead one to an ontological
David Bainbridge `physical' art domain which supports (al- dearth of material.
and Harold Hurrell though it does not assert) a fallacious and un- Air Show offered little to those importing
clarified (so far as it can be) notion of onto- principles of individuation for art objects, but
logical priority.5 (This is a remark on the vacuous or near vacuous 'presence' is still
vaunted sense of 'object'). Until recently, the `presence'. Again, the venerable aestheti-
same could have been said of the notions of cian's question: 'What is the ontological
persistence and spatio-temporal continuity.6 status of the work of art?' isn't accessible, but
And it still remains the business of the critic neither is the less hoary one (the specific one),
and the historian (if he is going to talk about `What is the ontological status of this work of
the work) to have settled, or at least to have art?', etc., and so on to include epistemologi-
salvaged something of identity where one has cal ones . . . given that the 'spectator' is no
his 'art objects' melting away or taking in new sceptic, or that he has no epistemological
recruits and equipment, etc.7 access to the instrumental domain.
The early Air Show (1966, 1967), Air Con- There are, as yet, no snarl-ups with identity
ditioning Show (1966, 1967) and the Heat Show (and not really with individuation if it's taken
STATUS AND PRIORITY I (1967) attracted Berkeleyesque remarks from seriously). Air Show, etc., preserved a vaunted
do not mean to identify "seeing" with the perusing (Macroscopic) position. That taxonomic modesty—but it didn't enshrine it
"seeing as". Seeing an X-ray tube is not see- these were, or could have been taken to be, as 'object' theorizing did.
ing a glass and metal object as an X-ray tube questions of epistemic value, as to the onto- An immediate exegesis of this work was con-
... the logic of "seeing as" seems to illuminate logical status of the 'object' (mistakenly and structual and declarative. The Air Show and
the general perceptual case. Consider again infecting 'higher' aestheticians' questions as Oxfordshire and, to some extent, the referents
the footprint in the sand. Here all the organi- to the ontological status of 'the work of art') in Frameworks rendered the strange, poor con-
zational features of "seeing as" stand out is no indication that they had a similar pre- catenation, offering this or that observation
clearly, in the absence of an "object".'—N. R. rogative character to those raised in connec- situation as a test conditional of the construct,
Hanson Patterns of Discovery, Cambridge U.P. tion with more recent work. The essentialisti- otiose in the end. None of the works was to
cally biased business of classification wasn't proceed by 'retroduction' either.
A purported life-history of so-called 'concep- yet built into the construct situation. It Lawrence Weiner's work is, it seems, a
tual art' (mentioning antecedents, etc.) would merely seemed that the vaunted sense of paradigm of the ambivalent (or at least,
not be a life-history of a specialized concep- `object', beloved of the minimalist illuminati, equivocal) attitude to the 'translation'. The
tual analysis, or one of linguistic analysis.' had set scarcely cogent theoretical (and point of the whole thing, for the committed
The suggestion that it would be of one of substantially constitutive) limits (needing handicraft artist, would have to be that no
these, and the remark that it may be regarded some theses of poverty) to what was a de- construct is exhausted even by an ever so
as a quasi-creative branch of the more antique complex constructual, assertoric and practical large set of conditionals.
offices of aesthetic theory emanates from a possibility. The point is that (e.g.) the genera Some other early work held on to other kinds
confusion of strategy with theory and from a with which Robert Morris did his sorting out of persistence, and, at least in some ways,
disposition to raise prerogative, contextually were fixated upon morphological differentiae. perusability. (Soil heaters, buried, and raising
otiose questions. A strategy is not a theory, but This allowed simplistic individuative prac- the temperature of the soil, are idiosyn-
a methodological design which may be ger- tices to be parasitic upon cardboard in- cratically somewhat more turgid than recent
mane for yielding or illuminating theories. stantials like 'useless things' etc., and in work—the formalities were not immediately or
It has been the case that the naive, pheno- the case of other writers, 'specific objects'. urgently macroscopic ones, though, scandal-
menalistic affectation of putative translations The matter of the ontological status of the ously, perusal came up for the count when,
from the construct to 'the object' has been objects which came substantially up for the over one of the outside ones, the grass grew
dropped by some artists as gratuitous and count was not of immediate concern; though longer, shading away according to the
semantically misleading. The outcome of this it may be argued that it remained problema- dissipation of heat in the soil. It is indeed
has not been that these artists engage with a tic qua the wider corpus of assertion. (This arguable that the Air Conditioning Show in
range of entities which, if they are not linguis- does not make this lot or the later lot of works particular was observationally as rich, yet
tic ones, are somehow spurious. There has, `numens' of some description — theology might contingently, what was to sustain interest
rather, been a willingness on the part of help out though). was the sort crossing— 'invisible' hyperbole
these artists to allow some credence to the Donald Judd's classificatory dictum may have perhaps—which became conventional sort.)
essentialistic view that how one does his been O.K. as strategy, but it remains a rather The expanded constructual situation con-
singling out determines what he singles out. naive piece of taxonomy,8 and one which noted not novel delights for the peruser (this
Another upshot of this view is that no-one doesn't take into account (by applying all- doesn't mean he was cut-out, it is just that
sees or singles out a mere space-occupier: over) different contexts of use. Otherwise it's one keeps with the polemically infectious
`object' becomes a more or less counterfeit harmless, counting in the Kantian sense of 'peruser') but-- a - multiplication of
instantial.2 constitu-tive sense (there aren't many statements which categorical and essential possibility.9 The
Now it must be remembered that all this is don't) and examinable via preference ran- apparent fertility of this situation was con-
neutral with respect to the question, once kings. This is not to give a lot of sway to the ceptual rather than observational. This is not
raised as a kind of obiter dictum by critics, alleged contrast between nominalism and to say that all one needed was a modus