Page 58 - Studio International - July August 1974

visual forms of printed or written UK Reviews structure of suicide', says Barthes reordering, of the activity of art. This
words and sentences. Conceptual just as Reinhardt said 'I'm just doing stance is manifest in the untitled
artists like Larry Weiner or James Victor Burgin, at the Lisson the last paintings anyone can do'. recent work by Victor Burgin
Coleman use written or spoken Gallery, London, May—June The desired isolation of art from moral exhibited at the Lisson Gallery.
language to indicate visual No understanding of the development imperatives, convention and values The new work consists of a
experiences, because to them the within the plastic arts represented by whether in minimal artefacts, repeated photographic image from an
visual materials up till now were too 'conceptual art' can adequately be Robbe-Grillet's nouveau roman, advertisment which might equally be
restricted. Bakker takes the opposite separated from a comprehension of Mallarmé's poetry, Beckett's theatre or regarded as an ideological
way ; he demonstrates the limitations the general crisis of modernism, a the music of John Cage, in the advertisement for individual
of traditional language and thereby tradition covering artistic endeavours pursuit of a homology of art ends in achievement and the pursuit of
searches for a possible widening of for a century or more and from a silence or at least where speech is interests regarded as individual as it
the means of communication. crisis in the specific practical indistinguishable from silence. actually is for sherry. (The girl in the
Liesbeth Brandt Corstius contingencies of the latter in ideas These are activities 'towards photo has apparently made it in her
of an 'avant-garde', of individualism literature', 'towards painting and profession to the cover of Vogue and
(the artist or group of artists are sculpture' and so on and have is toasting her success with her
separate from civilian or social group) recently been continued beyond the parents a few copies of Vogue and, of
and of 'art for art's sake' (the threshhold of the sensuous media course, Harvey's Bristol Cream.)
autonomy of aesthetic values from which define the 'arts'. Godard finds The photos have as 'subtitles'
prevailing social or moral values). no alternative but the documentary portions from a narrative belonging to
Modernism in this sense appears to film, the new 'breed' of writers in the a very different ideology (of common
be rooted in a much longer tradition French tradition (like Barthes) find interests) concerning the
(from the Renaissance) which themselves as journalists and realization of a Vietnamese soldier
envisages aesthetic values as 'intellectuals' and the new that heroism or personal success is
independent of 'mass values' by generation of British artists occupy achieved in the service of communal
the concept of fine or high art in their time talking about art — interests and not in individual
contradistinction to popular or folk conceptual art, fulfilling Hegel's glories. Accompanying this is a
art. prophecy more than a century earlier continuous text by Burgin which
Conceptual art as a contravention for the death of art conducted in the discusses some of the recent
of minimal art's affirmaton of the 'margin' of society. Where Reinhardt findings and analyses of cultural

Victor Burgin Lei Feng 1973/4
No 5 of series of 9 photos with text and believed he was doing the last semiologists like Umberto Eco and
subtext. 20 x 16 in. paintings, certain conceptual artists the now fashionable Christian Metz,
aesthetic in the 'sensuous medium' might believe they are doing the last both of whom have adopted a form
(Collingwood's term) employed in a art-works, though bearing in mind the of structural analysis indebted to
particular art (by the exclusion of all clause Hegel put on his prophecy, it Levi-Strauss and a definition of
else), belongs to a history of such is the finality of a particular sort of subject-matter indebted to Barthes
contraventions. Barthes referring to art, not art per se as the (particularly (ultimately from Saussure). Of
the modern writer talks of the desire to American) Mallarmé- Reinhardt course such study of signs and their
purify his materials by 'ceaselessly styled conceptual artists appear to use is highly objective and non-
exploding the ever-renewed husk of affirm in their mystical attempts at a evaluative. Where Metz, for example,
clichés, of habits ... and find again sublimation of art in language. does evaluate certain practices
the freshness of a pristine state of Conceptual art at best is not simply a within his subject-matter of film, as
language' but observes that passive reflection of a crisis inherent with the montage technique of
Mallarmé's 'typographical agraphia' in modernism to whose historical Eisenstein, he does so only on the
freed from social responsibility is continuum it submits itself, but in the basis that Eisenstein (and Kuleshov's)
finally rendered meaningless work of certain British artists is also ideas about the language of film in
Douwe Jan Bakker 4 from 236 Pronounceables solipsism. 'This art has the very an attempt at a conciliation, by which the technique is rooted (fifer