Page 30 - Studio International - October 1970

embarrassed or defensive about regarding one of requirements of a medium. attention to physical processes and techniques.
the 'academic' or 'accredited' media as his There are advantages to be gained from We cannot escape from the need to articulate
`wedded wife', as Wollheim puts it. On the other working in a medium that is a 'going concern' — physical energies, even if they are only streams
hand the partisanship of Bryan Robertson is an established social institution—whether that of air in speech or streams of ink in writing. Even
uncalled-for. Bridget Riley's paintings do not medium be academic or utilitarian. But what of in the extreme hypothetical case of an artist who
happen by magic, but through discipline and artists who believe art can be made out of used the legal system as his medium, his success
imaginative mastery of her medium. anything? What is the medium, for instance, in would depend in part on his ability to identify
As I have already suggested, there are some Douglas Huebler's Duration Piece No. 91969 and articulate the physical embodiments of
art-forms which use no technologies. Examples ('When Attitudes Become Form') where the conceptual confrontation: speeches, cross-talk,
are oral poetry, singing, mime, dance. Here it US parcel-post was used to send a plastic box documents, TV reportage, exhibits, possibly
seems that speech, sign-languages, voluntary within a series of containers to a series of costume and choreography.
gestures and involuntary bodily reflexes exploit addresses in the USA (the parcel being One of the failures of conceptual art,
the physical characteristics of the human body re-enclosed in a new container and re-addressed generally speaking, has been in its desire to
as a mechanical and topographic complex and for each trip) ? The medium is not just the bypass the medium, to create an 'immediate' art.
hence as a communication medium of a kind. documentation used to record the event, but Joseph Kosuth, for instance, appears to consider
The human sciences—linguistics, psychology, surely the parcel-post system itself. This is an that his work has no physical state.6 But this
anthropology etc. —can help us understand the interesting case because transport systems, fallacy is absent (or less prominent) in other
richness of this medium. All that needs to be though they are not media in my sense, also artists such as LeWitt, Bochner and Huebler. If
said here is that the resources and constraints of result in the exchange of information, through any sense is to be made of Victor Burgin's texts
the human body— everything from the uvula to the carriage of people and goods rather than they must be taken as lists to be stepped through
the sweat-glands—can be thought of as forming signals. Transport systems often act as support —analogous either to the logical flow of a
a communication medium continuous with those systems for media— classically, the railways computer programme for operating on data that
other media which depend on tools, inventions acted as a distributive system for the is to be 'inputted' in a pre-defined format,' or
or properties (in the theatrical sense) external to nineteenth-century newspaper—but clearly it is alternatively to some very generalized recipe for
the body. The performing arts I have listed original for an artist to adopt the parcel-post cooking from whatever ingredients may come to
above—oral poetry, singing, mime and dance— system as his medium. hand. Anyone who wishes to persuade us of the
often depend, though not always, on a written Huebler has also used a real FBI 'Wanted' validity or significance of Burgin's texts has an
notation. Where such a notation exists, we have poster and offered a reward for finding the obvious method open to him: he could lead us
two ways of 'taking' the performance and these criminal (Duration Piece No. 15—Global) and through one of the texts step by step, supplying
can coexist in our appreciation of it. First, we other American artists have tried to manipulate sample 'inputs'.
think of the poet, dramatist, composer or the 'systems' of Wall Street or the American There are a number of loose ends in the
choreographer as composing works which art-world. The most successful intervention of analysis of media that I have attempted in this
require interpretation. Second, we think of the this kind seems to have been the recent article. For instance, I have borrowed the term
performers of the work as artists in their own Haacke/Guggenheim affair, where Haacke made `stringencies' from Wollheim's Art and its
right—within the constraints of the text or script brilliant use of the communications network of Objects without elucidating the differences
or score that they are working from. Their the art-world—but actually articulating this between artistic styles, grammatical rules and
medium is their own bodies. network. Haacke believes that 'The artist's technical possibilities. The differences would
The art of Lygia Clark represents a reaction business requires his involvement in practically take some unravelling, for it is the interplay
against technology, a reversion to the human everything.' But the medium where he excels is between these three inconstant stringencies that
body as a fount of true experience. When she that of public relations. Thomas Messer constitutes art history. q
invites two people to manipulate large shaped becomes a fly in this amber. JONATHAN BENTHALL
sheets of transparent plastic—one person lying The discovery that cultural systems can be
on the ground, the other standing over his/her adopted as media has been one of the most 'Michael Fried, 'Art and Objecthood' in Minimal Art,
body—the plastic is a mere `prop'; her medium exciting of recent developments. Unfortunately ed. G. Battcock (Studio Vista, 1969).
is the human body, and the two participants few artists—just one or two like Haacke and John 'Bridget Riley, paintings and drawings 1951-71,
Hayward Gallery catalogue, 1971.
become a kind of system which can undergo a Latham—have been prepared to articulate rather 'Richard Wollheim, 'The art-lesson', Studio
limited set of transformations in time and space than gesticulate. It is possible to imagine an International, June 1971. Other borrowings from
Wollheim in this article are taken from his excellent
according to the constraints of its coupling: a artist 'working' the legal system of his country book Art and its Objects (Penguin 1970).
metaphor for the erotic relationship. (or several countries) as if it were a kind of Richard Morphet, introduction to Warhol catalogue,
It may be objected here that I am using the natural resource, engaging in litigation whose Tate Gallery, 1971; Barbara Reise, 'Sol LeWitt
drawings 1968-1969', Studio International, December
term 'medium' too widely. If the human body final outcome would be unpredictable but whose 1969.
is a medium, and a socio-economic institution course would illuminate the workings of 5 'Convincing' is one of Fried's key critical terms. It
like TV or the newspaper is also a medium, then society, and generate new meanings as does all occurs so frequently in his analyses as to lend them a
false persuasiveness. For instance, he writes on one of
when do we stop ? My answer would be that good art. Such a medium could be very fertile Michael Bolus's latest sculptures as follows
when we say that Lygia Clark or Nureyev or since a wealth of language-like stringencies (Artforum, June 1971):
Callas is using the body as a medium, we are already exists in the law. But the art would `What remains in doubt, I feel, is whether the
sculpture as a whole is physical enough to secure a
using the word in a strained sense, justified by require a study of technicalities, and an convincing sculptural identity or whether it is finally
the close association that exists between the understanding of how the law works as a method too unassertive and attenuated to establish itself other
body's own functions and its external tools and of social control. By contrast, the evocative legal than as a kind of shimmering mirage.'
Bolus's piece is no less physical, no more a mirage,
techniques. (This point could be further argued jargon and graphics that we find in Iain Baxter's than any other construction of twenty-six sturdy metal
by adducing the paintings of Pollock, or Jasper work is merely appropriating some of the elements arranged in a lattice. For 'convincing' read
Johns's studies for Skin, where the artist's oiled trappings of the law, like a small boy in a judge's `conforming to certain stylistic preferences formulated
face was rolled onto a sheet of paper and charcoal wig. by Michael Fried'.
6 Joseph Kosuth, 'Art after Philosophy, Part II',
was then absorbed by the blots.) I would rather If any physical process can be claimed as an Studio International, November 1969.
subject the principle of the 'medium' to strain art medium, then the definition of a medium 7 The analogy between Burgin's work and the 'block
than have to admit that there can exist such a becomes broad indeed. I would insist that it is diagrams' used by computer programmers and
psychologists has been suggested in an unpublished
thing as 'immediate' art—art which bypasses the still a useful concept since it forces us to give note by George Mallen.
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