Art Key Contemporary Thinkers

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contemporary

Jonathan Vickery


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First published in 2007 byBerg

Editorial ofces:1st Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford, OX4 1AW, UK

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA

© Diarmuid Costello and Jonathan Vickery 2007

All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced in any formor by any means without the written permission of Berg.

Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Art : key contemporary thinkers / edited by Diarmuid Costello andJonathan Vickery. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-319-1 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 1-84520-319-4 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-320-7 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 1-84520-320-8 (pbk.) 1. Art, Modern—20th century—Philosophy. 2. Art, Modern—21stcentury—Philosophy. I. Costello, Diarmuid. II. Vickery, Jonathan.

N66.A76 2007 709.04—dc22

2006031856

British Libr ary Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 184520 319 1 (Cloth)ISBN 978 184520 320 7 (Paper)

Typeset by JS Typesetting, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan

Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn

www.bergpublishers.com


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Acknowledgements vii

General Introduction ix

Section I: Art Theory and Practice

Introduction 3

DANIEL BUREN (1938–)Melanie Mariño 5

DAN GRAHAM (1942–)Eric de Bruyn 9

MIKE KELLEY (1954–)John Welchman 13

MARY KELLY (1941–)Margaret Iversen 17

JOSEPH KOSUTH (1945–)Michael Corris 21

BARBARA KRUGER (1945–)Esther Leslie 24

ROBERT MORRIS (1931–)Jonathan Vickery 28

ADRIAN PIPER (1948–)Robert del Principe 32

ROBERT SMITHSON (1938–1973)Dominic Rahtz 36

JEFF WALL (1946–)Stewart Martin 40

Section II: Art Theory and History

Introduction 47

NICOLAS BOURRIAUD (1965–)Claire Bishop 49

BENJAMIN BUCHLOH (1941–)

Christine Mehring 53

T. J. CLARK (1943–)Dominic Willsdon 57

THIERRY DE DUVE (1944–)Gregg Horowitz 60

JAMES ELKINS (1955–)Robert Williams 64

HAL FOSTER (1955–)Gordon Hughes 67

MICHAEL FRIED (1939–)Stephen Melville 71

CLEMENT GREENBERG (1909–1994)Diarmuid Costello 74

ROSALIND KRAUSS (1940–)Martha Buskirk 78

W. J. T. MITCHELL (1942–)Riccardo Marchi 82

LINDA NOCHLIN (1931–)Francesca Berry 86

GRISELDA POLLOCK (1949–)Kirstie Skinner 90

CONTENTS


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Section III: Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics

Introduction 97

THEODOR ADORNO (1903–1969)Michael Kelly 99

J. M. BERNSTEIN (1947–)Espen Hammer 102

NOËL CARROLL (1947–)Katerina Reed-Tsocha 106

STANLEY CAVELL (1926–)Stephen Mulhall 110

ARTHUR C. DANTO (1924–)David Carrier 114

GILLES DELEUZE (1925–1995)Darren Ambrose 117

JACQUES DERRIDA (1930–2004)Jonathan Lahey Dronseld 121

GEORGE DICKIE (1926–)Cain Samuel Todd 125

JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD (1924–1998)James Williams 129

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY (1908–1961)Alex Potts 132

ALBRECHT WELLMER (1933–)Ruth M. Sonderegger 136

RICHARD WOLLHEIM (1923–2003)Derek Matravers 140

Section IV: Theory and Philosophy of Culture

Introduction 147

ROLAND BARTHES (1915–1980)Nancy Shawcross 149

GEORGES BATAILLE (1897–1961)Michael Richardson 153

JEAN BAUDRILLARD (1929–)Mike Gane 156

WALTER BENJAMIN (1892–1940)Helmut Schmitz 160

PIERRE BOURDIEU (1930–2002)Gordon Fyfe 164

JUDITH BUTLER (1956–)Rebecca Zorach 168

MICHEL FOUCAULT (1926–1984)Scott Durham 172

FREDRIC JAMESON (1934–)David Ayers 175

MELANIE KLEIN (1882–1960)Mignon Nixon 179

JULIA KRISTEVA (1941–)Sara Beardsworth 183

NIKLAS LUHMANN (1927–1998)Francis Halsall 187

Glossary of Key Terms 191

Contributors’ Biographies 209

CONTENTS vI


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We would like to thank our commissioning editor Tristan Palmer at Berg for rst proposingthis project, and the contributors who made it possible. Their generosity, punctuality, andgood-natured responses to numerous requests for clarications and reformulations madea potentially hazardous project almost manageable. Particular thanks are due to MichaelRichardson and Riccardo Marchi for contributing at shorter notice. Our gratitude also goesto D. J. Simpson, Hannah Jamieson, Sarah Shalgosky at the Mead Gallery, Warwick ArtsCentre, and Sue Dibben at the Humanities Research Centre at Warwick University. The School

of Arts & Humanities at Oxford Brookes University supported work on this project prior toDiarmuid Costello joining Warwick University, as did, indirectly, a Leverhulme Trust ResearchFellowship. In a deeper sense, we are both indebted to the Departments of Philosophy andthe History and Theory of Art at the University of Essex, in whose intense and congenialatmosphere the intellectual commitments that animate this volume were formed.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS


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GENERAL INTRODUCTIONWhat different ways of interpreting art are there, and what different concepts and theoreticalframeworks are involved? What is the value of art? How does art communicate, embody orotherwise express its meaning? Why does art’s form and signicance change over time, andwithin different contexts? Do changes in art reect changes in culture and society as a whole,and if so how? These are questions that continually need to be asked and reassessed. Artitself is a ‘discourse’ – a conceptual eld within which and around which move various kinds ofobjects, activities, processes, ideas and theories, subcultures and movements, institutions and

exhibitions. The central characteristic of this discourse, particularly in its most recent forms,is its unstable, internally conicted and often bewildering character. This can make trying tomaster the discourse of art a frustrating, but equally an intellectually exhilarating endeavour.Contemporary art in particular has never enjoyed such widespread interest and currency, yetthe theoretical frameworks it produces and draws upon frequently remain opaque.

This book is a response to this situation, and is intended to put its readers in a positionto explore and question theories, ideas and claims that they might otherwise be forced totake on trust. Of course no primer, however good, can replace reading the original texts.But in the case of those thinkers on art considered here, some introduction is necessary tounderstanding what one encounters when one does so. If this book sends its readers back tothe originals with greater condence and curiosity, and a better sense of how a given thinkersits within a wider eld of overlapping debates, it will have served its purpose. To this end thecollection brings together upcoming younger scholars with scholars of international standingto write in a way that is clear and approachable yet nonetheless challenging – both for thereader and towards the thinkers and texts discussed. As such, the intention was always tolay the ground for further critical exploration on the part of the reader. Read in this spirit,in conjunction with the primary and secondary literature discussed, we believe that thiscollection will put its readers in a much better position to develop their own perspective.

The volume spans the ideas and theories of forty-ve ‘key contemporary thinkers’ on

art. What counts as ‘key’, in this context, is a matter of both judgment and the audience weenvisage, and in part hope to forge, through this collection. All such lists are partial, and therewere a number of theorists whose work we were unable to cover in the space available, muchas we would have liked to. By ‘contemporary thinkers’, we mean theorists who are associatedwith a coherent body of thought or ideas, which their work on art embodies or reects, andwhose w ork continues to impact on thinking about artistic practice, theory and historicalanalysis today. As such, we use the term ‘contemporary’ in a fairly loose sense historically(roughly equivalent to ‘since the 1960s’), and to signify impact rather than origins. To pick anobvious example: Benjamin is hardly a ‘contemporary thinker’ in biographical terms (he diedin 1940), but his work has had an exceptional inuence on art theory and criticism since thelate 1960s. We take the 1960s as our point of departure because it is the locus of the mostsalient cultural transformation of our time – the move from modernism to postmodernism. To


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the extent that we still inhabit postmodernism today or its aftermath today, this is the periodof our ‘contemporaneity’, broadly conceived. This book is in part a cultural, philosophical andart historical roadmap of the ramications of that transition.

The book is divided into four broad sections. These are in no sense meant to exhaust therange of discourses one can nd represented in other books surveying the theory of arttoday. But given how widely areas not represented here (areas such as queer theory or post-colonial theory) have been covered elsewhere, we wanted to focus instead on broad ‘bodiesof thought’ around legacies of modernism and postmodernism in the arts. The rst section isunusual, in so far as artists are typically neglected in anthologies of this kind. We have soughtto redress this by including a section on artists as thinkers , that is, artists who have made amajor contribution to thought about art since the 1960s through their writings as well as theirart. Though one can nd many anthologies of artists’ writings, one rarely nds artists treatedon an equal footing with theorists, historians and philosophers when it comes to producing

knowledge about art. Section II includes those art historians and theorists who have made, orstill are making, the greatest impact on thought about art during this period, and whose workclearly embodies a broader intellectual position despite remaining close to its object. SectionIII includes philosophers, from both the ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ traditions, who have notonly made major contributions to recent debates in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, butwhose work is also widely read beyond the connes of professional philosophy. Section IV isthe most diverse, and in this sense reects the genuine diversity of thought about art today.Thinkers in this section are drawn from a range of disciplines, such as sociology, and sub-disciplines, such as semiotics and psychoanalysis, as well as the ‘philosophy of culture’.

Most of the thinkers proled in this book will already be more or less familiar to readersin the eld; though we have also included several we believe are typically overlooked (suchas Wellmer and Luhmann), as well as more recent thinkers (such as Bernstein and Elkins),whose work is only now beginning to gain recognition and inuence. In one case we haveeven included a curator (Bourriaud) given how widely his writings and exhibitions have beendiscussed over the last decade. If it is possible to talk about a coherent ‘discourse of art’,it is a hybrid discourse, which includes, in addition to academic discourse, the conventionsof exhibition and display, varying traditions and anti-traditions of artistic practice, and therhetoric of art and literary criticism, not to mention the range of cognate discourses thelatter draws on. This volume hopes to engage readers who are involved with the arts in thisexpanded sense, as that is where serious thinking about art is today most needed.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION x


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Art Theory

andPractice


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INTRODUCTION

The term ‘art theory’ is broadly self-explanatory; it is a conceptual framework, series ofprinciples, or set of substantive theses that explain the appearance, structure, function orsignicance of works of art. What is art ‘practice’? In an age of ready-mades, installation art,video art, environmental art and performance art, that question is more complex, and indeedmore complex now than it has been at any previous point in art history. Perhaps surprisingly,then, it is no longer regarded as a contentious question. Over the last three to four decadesan ‘institutionalization’ of once-radical avant-garde art practices has taken place: what was

once controversial, experimental, unconventional or simply chaotic, no longer provokesthe shock, censure or marginalization it once did. As the old adage goes – heterodoxybecomes orthodoxy, and the question ‘but is it art?’ has for the most part simply fallen away.Contemporary orthodoxy is not doctrinaire, however, or at least is so only to the extent that itinsists on the absence of any restriction on what might count as art, in principle. As such, itrefuses to specify an alternative, or even ‘expanded’, set of art-making procedures to ll thevacuum left by the demise of previous constraints on art practice.

Since the 1960s art has thus come to be understood less in terms of an object, and morein terms of an activity, process, form of ‘intervention’ in a given context or discourse, orthe creation of a new context in which something might happen. Where talk of art practicepreviously involved discussing the material construction and artistic creation of works of art(the demands of the medium, of painting or of sculpture, their techniques and so on), sincethe 1960s the medium or material constitution of the work has tended to become increasinglyrelative to the means, location and context of utterance; and the ‘visual’ aspect of that act andthat context need not be dominant or explicit, and in some cases is not even apparent. Theonly procedural restrictions on practice today take the form of physical-economic restrictions(what technically can and cannot be accomplished), and institutional protocols (what forms ofpractice institutions are or are not prepared to support).

Many of these characteristics of art practice since the 1960s originate during the 1920s

or even earlier: lm, montage, text and image composition, performance, graphic design,installation, non-art materials, even the use of rubbish and various other forms of detritus.The European avant-gardes were reacting against ‘classical’ training, where the historicalgenres of drawing, painting, sculpture and architecture each had their own hierarchy of sub-genres, and these were governed by strict procedures of technical convention and stylisticprotocol. The institutional power of the academies, its training mechanisms and grip on theart market were still signicant. But the avant-garde were also reacting against the hermeticsocial world of bourgeois ateliers, galleries and salons, where even once-radical formssuch as Impressionism and post-Impressionism were being turned into a form of passiveconsumption. In the face of a corrupt and increasingly violent world, the avant-garde cameto see existing art as a mere salve for the eyes, a form of social consolation, with no furthersignicance or ability to intervene in society for the better.


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ART THEORY AND PRACTICE 4

During the 1960s such avant-garde impulses were reinvigorated, and with them the demandthat art nd ways to address and even intervene in social and political life. Consequently,many artists felt the need to understand the relation between art and society, and to conceive,at the level of ideas and concepts, how art and life might be realigned. Intellectual debate andtheorizing about the nature of art became commonplace, and often intrinsic to the processof art making itself. Articulating one’s practice in written form, writing art criticism, makingpublic statements, manifesto-like political commitments, or philosophical pronouncementson the nature of reality or human experience became an increasingly common componentof artistic practice. As a result, practice itself became more and more theorized, and theorybecame the framework within which practice was increasingly reconceived.

Conceptual artists (such as Joseph Kosuth), who believed that claims about the meaningof art rested on a philosophical understanding of the nature of language were key to thistransition; while sculptors (like Robert Morris) explored how language itself emerged from

a deeper perception and cognitive and bodily engagement with the surrounding world andits horizons of intelligibility. Other artists from the same period, such as Daniel Buren, DanGraham and Robert Smithson, investigated art’s networks of production and disseminationthrough both their writings and their works for non-standard contexts (magazines, billboards,and various other borderline or non-art spaces). Artists such as Adrian Piper and Mary Kellyadded more explicitly political issues such as race and the construction of self and genderto the equation, and the theoretical context has only got broader since. As a result, theexploration and construction of meaning has itself become a ‘practice’ viewers need to engagein, and one made complex by the fact that works or activities are themselves emerging out

of heavily theorized contexts of artistic practice. The artists included here have substantiallycontributed to this context since the 1960s.


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Drawing on the legacy of minimalism,Buren’s practice also encompasses aconsiderable body of writing. Cogentlyarticulating the political imperative ofinstitutional critique for the post-minimalistgeneration, these texts comprise manifestosfrom the period of his association withOlivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier and NieleToroni, pronouncing the demise of painting;interviews, responses and letters that debunkobjections to Buren’s disclosure of therelationship of art and its site; critical textsthat dene site-specicity in terms of thedeconstruction of cultural limits; and verbal

descriptions that accompany the Photo-Souvenirs, intended primarily as a referencefor the reactivation of past projects. Burenwarns that his writings are not intended asexplanations, which might exempt the readerfrom the direct experience of the work. Attimes ambivalent about the status of hiscriticism, Buren has insisted on its derivativecharacter: ‘the act of painting precedes themand goes beyond them’ (‘Why Write Texts or

the Place from Where I Act’ [ WTPA], 1973 inLes Écrits). Yet, the artist has also alludedto the complementary relation of his visualand textual output, thus reinforcing thedissolution of the autonomous art object:‘They are not to obscure their object butrather to permit seeing what they cannot say’(WTPA).

Buren’s most important theoreticalcontributions dated from 1967 to 1973.

Written for the Conceptual art exhibition,Konzeption/Conception(Städtische Museum,Leverkusen), ‘Warning’ (1969) invokestheory as a revolutionary praxis, followingthe lead of the structuralist Marxist LouisAlthusser. In ‘Warning’, Buren rejects thetraditional conception of art and its historicaldevelopment ‘from the Mythical to theHistorical, from the Illusion to the Real’.To establish the radicality of this break,the essay distances Buren’s project fromconceptual art; by substituting concept forobject, Buren contends, conceptual art fails

to interrogate art’s location, yielding an‘ideal-object’ that merely feeds the exhibitionapparatus. Buren’s reading reducesconceptual art to the ‘Analytic Conceptualism’espoused by JOSEPH KOSUTH ’s proposition,‘Art as idea as idea’. However, ‘Warning’ alsosuggests afnities between Buren’s workand the more broadly construed ‘SyntheticConceptualism’. In the essay, Buren pointsto the ‘death of the subject’ propoundedby French anti-humanist cultural theory inthe 1960s, which decisively inuenced thediscourse surrounding conceptual art (cf.ROLAND BARTHES , MICHEL FOUCAULT ).

For Buren, the anonymity of his neutral,immutable signs signied the end ofauthorial ownership, while inaugurating thebirth of art as public property.

In ‘Warning’, Buren posits ‘the location(outside or inside) where a work is seen isits boundary’. The texts ‘The Function ofthe Studio’ (1971) and ‘The Function of theMuseum’ (1970) attend to the symmetryof two such locations. While the former

focuses on the space of art’s production,which Buren describes as the least visibleof art’s containers, the latter dissects thespace of its presentation, which Buren likensto an ‘asylum’. Moreover, he derogates thestudio to ‘a kind of commercial depot’, whichserves not only as a place for the creationand storage of art but also as a way stationfor the selection and dissemination of objectsby the museum. Read together, the two

texts amplify Buren’s critical modelling ofsite as a relay of the distinct, yet interrelatedeconomies of production and consumption.Buren apocalyptically heralded the deathof all art enmeshed in this circuitry (themuseum is also a ‘cemetery’) and assertedthat his work proceeds from the ‘extinction’of the studio.

If the museum structurally inuences theproduction of art, it ‘marks’ the reception ofart in kind. Delimited as aesthetic, economicand mystical, the museum’s functions ensurethe proper interpretation of an object’s

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signicance, the management of its socialand economic value, and the preservationof its aura (cf. BENJAMIN ). Subverting themuseum’s self-presentation as a refuge forart, Buren stresses that ‘whether the workis directly – consciously or not – producedfor the Museum, any work presented in thatframework, if it does not explicitly examinethe inuence of the framework upon itself,falls into the illusion of self-sufciency – oridealism’. The text aligns those institutionalfalsications with ideological complicities,denouncing the ‘careful camouageundertaken by the prevalent bourgeois

ideology’ (‘The Function of the Museum’,1970).

Buren’s text ‘Critical Limits’ (1970)systematically diagrams these camouageoperations within the advanced art of thetime, including minimal art, earth art, andconceptual art. The text presents the historyof art as a ‘history of rectos’. That is, if thecanvas conceals the stretcher, the workof art conceals its material and political

underpinnings. For Buren, this deceptionextends from traditional through avant-garde art, so that as conventional paintingand sculpture act as ‘a security valve’ for analienated, bourgeois art system, the ready-made, which only replaced painting, enacts‘the radical (i.e. petit bourgeois) negationof art in favour of the object (“reality”) as itis’ (‘Critical Limits’, [CL]). His most severecriticism, however, is directed against the

exotic relocation of art to the open landscape,especially, if implicitly, by ROBERTSMITHSON . In Buren’s scathing assessment,Smithson’s ‘artistic safaris’ attempt tobypass the forces that frame artistic laborrather than confronting the crisis of culturein late capitalist society: ‘Art is not free, theartist does not express himself freely (hecannot). Art is not the prophecy of a freesociety. Freedom in art is the luxury/privilegeof a repressive society’ ( CL). In his mosttrenchant formulation of art’s function, Burenconcludes, ‘Art whatever else it may be is

exclusively political. What is called for is theanalysis of formal and cultural limits (and notone or the other) within which art exists andstruggles’ ( CL).

The explicitly politicized rhetoric of Buren’scriticism distinguishes his work from thediscourse of Minimal art out of which itdeveloped. Informed by the translationof MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY ’s work,minimalist artists rerouted the site ofaesthetic meaning from the self-sufcientartwork to the physical context it shareswith an embodied viewer. In contrast to thephenomenological basis of minimalism,

the historical materialism of Buren’scritique fuelled its emphasis on art’smediation by the ideological contradictionsof advanced capitalism. This conception ofcultural production was deeply indebtedto Situationist theory, which argued thatthe intensied commodication of theimage in the ‘society of spectacle’ calledfor the dissolution of art as a separate andspecialized sphere.

Buren’s revision of Minimalistcontextualism was roundly condemnedby minimal artists such as Dan Flavin andDonald Judd. As Alexander Alberro notes,this negative reception was rooted in thecultural and political distance between theneo-Marxist elements of French culturaltheory in the late 1960s, and the moreconservative implications of AmericanMinimal art. While Flavin similarly challenged

the auratic art object and Judd lamented themuseum’s dependency on the commercialgallery system, both artists remainedindifferent to the inoculation of art, andopposed the conation of avant-gardismwith radical political critique. As Flavincaustically remarked, ‘the term “avant-garde” ought to be restored to the FrenchArmy where its manic sense of futilitypropitiously belongs. It does not apply toany American art that I know about’ (‘SomeRemarks . . . Excerpts from a SpleenishJournal’, p. 27).

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By the end of the 1970s, however,Buren’s project of critical negation founda sympathetic audience among criticsassociated with October . BENJAMINBUCHLOH lauded Buren’s later fashioningof ‘the artist as deliberate decorator ofthe status quo’ (‘The Museum and theMonument’, p. 137). For Buchloh, Buren’sparadigm of art as decoration gaveconcrete form to capitalism’s swift andtotal reappropriation of artistic productionas political ornamentation. HAL FOSTER ,on the other hand, identied Buren withthe second moment of a post-war neo-

avant-garde, which reworked earlier avant-garde assaults on the institution of art toopen new spaces for critical elaboration.Indeed, since the 1980s, artists rangingfrom Louise Lawler to Andrea Fraserdeveloped Buren’s institutional analysis byhighlighting the multiplied functions withinan art apparatus that has expanded beyond

the artist–dealer–critic nexus. Other artists,including Mark Dion, Renee Green andFred Wilson often collaborate with differentgroups to blur the limits between art andnon-art, pushing Buren’s cultural critiquetowards a more diversied engagementwith the social discourses of racism, sexismand environmentalism. At the same time,contemporary artists like Jorge Pardo andTobias Rehberger reanimate the decorativeimpulse in Buren’s work to explore thefusion of art and everyday life under theregime of design. This recent turn, however,problematizes Buren’s mimicry of the very

kinds of alienation he opposes. Does thiscritical strategy remain limited by the forcesit contests? If so, might this accommodationto our totalizing culture of design lead artback into the path of consumerism it seeks todivert?

MELANIE MARIÑO

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary literature

Buren’s essays are collected in:Buren, D.,Les Écrits (1965–1990) (3 vols), ed.

J.-M. Poinsot, Bordeaux: Centre d’art

plastique contemporain, Musée d’artcontemporain, 1991.

Secondary literature

Alberro, A., ‘The Turn of the Screw: DanielBuren, Dan Flavin, and the Sixth GuggenheimInternational Exhibition’,October 80 (Spring1997).

Buchloh, H. D., ‘The Museum and the Monument:Daniel Buren’sLes Couleurs/Les Formes’,(1981) inNeo-avantgarde and Culture IndustryEssays on European and American Art from1955 to 1975 , Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,2000.

Buren, D.,Les couleurs: sculptures/Les formes:

peintures, ed. B. H. D. Buchloh, Halifax:NASCAD with Paris: Musée national d’artmoderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1981.

Flavin, D., ‘Some Remarks . . . Excerpts froma Spleenish Journal’, Artforum vol. 5, no. 4(December 1966).

Foster, H., ‘Who’s Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde’, inThe Return of the Real. Cambridge:MIT Press, 1996.

Lelong, G.,Daniel Buren, Paris: Flammarion,2001.

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Dan Graham is one of the most prolic artist-writers of his generation of post-minimalartists. Although generally referred to as aconceptual artist, Graham’s practice evadeseasy categorization. Not only has he deployeda variety of media, such as photography,lm, video, performance, and architecture,not to mention the magazine page, but he

has also resisted the tendency towardsspecialization within the art world (whichhas recently generated such institutionalidentities as the ‘video artist’ or ‘art critic’).Instead, Graham’s interdisciplinary approachto writing and art making aims to exposethe inner contradictions of the culturalmoments he lived through, whether thisconcerned the gallery practice of minimalismor the subcultural domain of rock music,

to name but two of the topics he startedwriting about in the 1960s. Furthermore, hiswriting frequently plays off more than oneregister of meaning at the same time anddoes not stand in a mere supplementaryrelation to his artistic work. To be sure, hiswriterly method fundamentally differs fromthe exhortations of the artist’s manifesto orthe propositional form of art theory. Grahamparticularly refutes the latter genre of writing

as representative of a ‘logical abstract’ modeof thought that leads to an impoverishedpractice of ‘philosophical actualization’ or‘idea art’ (‘My Works for Magazine Pages: AHistory of Conceptual Art’, inTwo-Way MirrorPower[TMP ], p. 12).

Graham’s artistic self-fashioning followsdirectly on the heels of such minimalistartist-critics as Donald Judd, Dan Flavinand Sol LeWitt. Graham started out as thedirector of the short-lived John DanielsGallery in December 1964, where he exhibitedthe minimalists before the gallery folded

after one season. John Daniels became a siteof animated discussion, where art theory wasdebated in conjunction with a host of otherintellectual currents, such as serial music,the French New Novel and New Wave cinema,and new psychological and scientic theories.The protagonists of this debate shared ananti-humanist stance which opposed the two

dominant, expressionist (Harold Rosenberg)and formalist (CLEMENT GREENBERG )versions of late modernist aesthetics.Minimalist practice, for instance, negatedGreenberg’s twin postulates of the autonomyof the medium and the transcendence ofthe viewer, by implicating the architecturalstructure of the gallery as an exterior frameof reference and thereby immersing theviewer in literal time and space. Graham

realized, however, that minimalism did notacknowledge the progressive ‘mediatization’of the artwork in contemporary society. Hethus decided to juxtapose the gallery spaceof minimalism to the information space ofpop art. The result of this dialectical strategywere Graham’s ‘works for magazine pages’,which not only transgured the minimalistobject into reproducible, disposable artpieces, but also functioned as decoys, or

pseudo-objects, in which the overt content ofthe texts masked their underlying procedureof critique.

With circumspection, we may identify threephases in Graham’s work: (i) the works formagazine pages of the latter 1960s; (ii) theperformance and video time-delay works ofthe 1970s; and (iii) the architectural modelsand pavilion structures of the late 1970s andafter. While each phase employs differentmeans of presentation, there is a commonstrategy that runs throughout – the use ofwhat he calls ‘found structures’ or media

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clichés that are derived from a populardiscourse on science or psychology. Forinstance Graham has proposed the term‘topology’ as the dominant ‘mathematicalmetaphor’ of the 1960s. He appropriatessuch ‘found structures’ as relational modelsof socio-political organization, which allowshim to critique the autonomous status of art;yet these models-as-clichés always remaincritical of themselves as well. Within thecontext of his early writing, in particular,the text constitutes a kind of ruse thatmaintains an ironic relation to the ‘academicseriousness’ of late modernism and the

‘idea art’ of certain conceptualist colleagues.Yet, throughout his writing career, Grahamconsistently maps conicting systems ofdiscursive knowledge onto each other, andplays the codes of the ‘high’ against the ‘low’.

The magazine pieces transferred theminimalist grid to the ‘pop’ domain ofpublicity.Schema (1966) is a perfect exampleof this. The schema as such consists of anabstract ‘data grid’ of printing components

(font size, number of words, paper stock,etc.), which acquires a different content witheach instance of publication.Schema’s gridis thus in-formed by the contingencies of itsexternal support. Graham also conceivedof texts, such as Information, that couldpass under the editorial radar as an essay,but would actually provide a vehicle forthe publication of his magazine pieces.Inspired by, among other sources, Marshall

McLuhan’sGutenberg Galaxy , Information exposes the manner in which the standard,narrative and spatial order of the Westerntext imposes a unitary viewpoint on thereader. Information not only presents variouscounter-models to the Western text (e.g.Borges’s ‘Library’ or Mallarmé’s ‘Book’),but also, by means of its own modularconstruction, evades the very literaryperspectivalism it attacks.

This tenuous distinction between thecategories of ‘magazine work’ and ‘essay’does not always hold up. Perhaps Graham’s

most celebrated work of the 1960s is thephoto-essay Homes for America (1966–67).Accompanied by snapshots of suburbanhousing developments in New Jersey takenby Graham,Homes for America reads, at rst,as a sociological essay on the standardizedlandscape of the ‘new city’, albeit an essaywritten in an oddly non-committal, paratacticstyle. In effect, the textual and graphicstructure of Homes for America mimicsthe serialized logic of the housing projectsthemselves, which Graham describes asconstituting a permutational series of empty‘shells’. The text is composed, in part, of a

collage of advertising pamphlets which listin tabular fashion the predetermined optionsof the potential homeowner. The reader-viewer is thus situated within a shiftingnetwork of information, rather than offeredthe illusion of an exterior vantage point ontoa social totality. Yet, this decentring of thesubject does not halt at the borders of adisenchanted suburbia; Homes for America was rst published within the pages of Arts

Magazine. To its contemporary audience,therefore, the correspondence between thesystemic logic of the tract housing ‘shells’and the empty ‘cubes’ of minimalism wouldhave been immediately apparent.

The various characteristics of themagazine pieces – their performativestatus, their deliberate confusion of thepre-packaged messages and uniformpublics of special-interest magazines

– were intended as a ‘catalyst for change’.Nevertheless, the very ephemerality of themagazine works was to reect the temporalcondition of an emergent consumer societythat dwelled in an eternal present. Hence,in the 1970s, Graham’s critique would followan altered path with his video installationsand performances, which used time-delayloops and multiple, mirroring surfaces.These works were intended to foreground anawareness of the viewer’s own perceptualprocess and to show the ‘impossibility oflocating a pure present tense’ (‘Video in

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relation to Architecture’, p. 186). As Graham’swriting at this point indicates, his videosand performances gured as ecological(or topological) models of the various newsocial collectivities that emerged during the1970s, from feminist ‘consciousness raising’sessions to psychological encounter groups.The ‘hermetic, anonymous informationquality of earlier “conceptual” work’ is nowabandoned in favour of a deconstruction ofintersubjective experience as articulatedwithin the technological domain of cinema,television and video (‘Performance: End of the“60s”’, in TMP , p. 143). Graham’s theoretical

sources are now, among others, Kurt Lewin’sdynamic psychology and Jacques Lacan’swritings on the mirror stage. The visualaxes of projection and identication, theprocess of subjectivation and objectivation,the positions of self and other, all becomeinterchangeable in what Graham calls thechiasmic ‘topological’ space of his perceptual‘machines’ (‘Cinema’, 1981, in Rock MyReligion [RMR], p. 169).

In the 1980s, Graham’s investigationsof the mediatized realm of everydayexperience lead him back to his previousdialogue with the discourse of architectureand urbanism that began with Homesfor America . At the same time, Grahambecame aware of WALTER BENJAMIN andMICHEL FOUCAULT ’s work on the status ofhistorical memory, which provided him withan antidote to the historicism that pervades

postmodernist debates of the early 1980s.In a series of important essays, Grahamtraces a genealogy of social power as itlters through the overlapping domains ofmass media, technology, architecture andurban planning. More specically, Grahamexamines the contemporary issue of thedebasement of public space (referring tothe various examples of suburban housing,corporate architecture, shopping malls andentertainment parks) and he studies theattempts of postmodern architects, such asRobert Venturi or Rem Koolhaas, to counter

the historical amnesia and deracinatedcharacter of modern (i.e. functionalist) andpostmodern (i.e. historicist) architecture.Parallel to this research, Graham beginsto design a series of mirrored pavilionstructures, which overlay, in a dizzyingarray of architectural typologies, Marc-Antoine Laugier’s fantasy of the primitivehut, baroque garden pavilions, Rococosalons, fairground mirror palaces, modernistglasshouses, corporate architecture and,of course, the minimalist cube (‘The City asMuseum’, 1981/93, in RMR).

This renewed emphasis on the public

space of architecture (which has neverbeen totally absent in Graham’s work) isaccompanied by an intense fascination withthe public media sphere of popular culture, inparticular the phenomenon of rock music. Hepublished several crucial essays and videoworks (e.g. RMR [1982–84]) on youth culturein its hydra-headed form as both a socialmovement of resistance and a commodiedspectacle of revolt. While the video-essay

Rock My Religion demonstrates how theanxieties of society regarding adolescentsexuality and rebellion have been negotiatedwithin rock music since the 1950s, it is punkthat represents the true revelatory momentin this history: through its self-consciousmanipulation of the codes of fashion and rockmusic, punk makes its audience aware of itsown commercial exploitation. This readingshows Graham’s interest in situationist

theory (‘McLaren’s Children’, 1981/88,in RMR), which, by the 1980s, becameunderstood as an important forebear of thedominant critical paradigm of ‘representationtheory’. It also manifests Graham’s convictionthat resistance to the social power of latecapitalism remains possible, yet that anyform of contestation must unfold uponthe terrain of the spectacle itself. Notsurprisingly, therefore, several of hiscontemporary essays explore pre-modernistforms of spectacle (‘Theater, Cinema, Power’,1983, in RMR).

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Graham was very active as organizer,exhibiter and lecturer within the artcommunity of the late 1960s and early 1970s.Widespread recognition of his work, however,would come in the course of the 1970s. The1978 catalogue in the Van Abbemuseum inEindhoven that contained the rst extensivehistorical analysis of the work by BENJAMINBUCHLOH was particularly signicant.Dan Graham’s writings and interviews arescattered across a wide variety of sources,but have been assembled in the two recentvolumes Rock My Religion and Two-Way MirrorPower . Within the revived debate of the 1990s

on the legacy of conceptual art, Homes for America came to assume a central role. Theprimary topic of discussion was the position

of the magazine pieces within a genealogy ofinstitutional critique, but since the publicationof the catalogue raisonné in 2001, the focus ofattention has shifted towards the politics ofpublicity that is implicit in Graham’s work. Inthe process of unfolding its oblique criticismof minimalism and pop, Graham’s practiceestablished a complex and ambivalentrelationship to the emergent spaces ofinformation. The feedback structure ofthe video performances, in particular,foreshadow certain features of a developed‘control society’ ( GILLES DELEUZE ) and it isthis anticipatory horizon of the work to which

current, critical scholarship is directed.

ERIC de BRUYN

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary literature

Graham, D., Video – Architecture – Television:Writings on Video and Video Works 1970–1978 ,ed. B. H. D. Buchloh, Halifax: The Press ofNova Scotia College of Art & Design, 1979.

Graham, D., ‘Video in Relation to Architecture’,in eds D. Hall and J. Fifer, Illuminating Video ,New York: Aperture, 1990.

Graham, D., Rock My Religion: Writings and ArtProjects , ed. B. Wallis, Cambridge: MIT Press,1993.

Graham, D., Two-Way Mirror Power: SelectedWritings by Dan Graham on his Art , ed. A.Alberro, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.


Alberro, A., Dan Graham: Models to Projects,1978–1995 , New York: Marian GoodmanGallery, 1996.

Brouwer, M. and Anastas, R. (eds), Dan Graham:Works, 1965–2000 , Dusseldorf: Richter Verlag,2001.

Graham, D., Articles , Eindhoven: Stedelijk VanAbbemuseum, 1978 (text by B. H. D. Buchloh).

Martin, J.-H. (ed.), Dan Graham: Pavilions , Bern:Kunsthalle Bern, 1983 (text by T. de Duve).

Pelzer, B., Francis, M. and Colomina, B., DanGraham , London: Phaidon, 2001.

Wall, J., Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel , Toronto: ArtMetropole, 1991.

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Mike Kelley was born in Detroit, Michigan,took a BFA degree from the University ofMichigan, Ann Arbor, in 1976, and an MFAfrom the California Institute of the Arts,Valencia, California, two years later. One ofthe most diverse artists of his generation,Kelley has made signal contributions inmusic and sound culture: beginning in the

mid-1970s with the formation of his noiseband Destroy All Monsters, continuing withgroups The Poetics and Extended Organ; inperformance between 1978 ( Indianana andMy Space) and the late 1980s (and againin collaboration with Paul McCarthy in the1990s); in sculpture and installation, notablyin his series of oor and related pieces usingyarn dolls and stuffed animals (beginningaround 1987); and in single channel and

sculpturally sited video (from The BananaMan, 1983, to his recent exhibition at theGagosian Gallery in New York, Day is Done ,Autumn 2005). He has also acted in severalvideos and lms and curated exhibitions,including two versions of The Uncanny (1993and 2004). Further, Kelley is an importantwriter, critic, theorist and interviewer whosecollected writings are probably the mostvoluminous and generically adventurous of

any contemporary artist writing in English.Unlike some of his peers associated withNew York postmodernism in the 1980s,Kelley has rarely made work in whichtheoretical considerations are programmaticor contrived. Instead, his areas of enquiryand reection are interleaved across therange of his visual and textual work. Theseinclude: the aftermath of modernism and itstechniques; sonic cultures; psychoanalyticand psychological theory and practice;performativity; the social actions of memory;science ction and ufology; artist-subjects

and their authorship; architecture and theperception of social space; and the structureand deployment of vernacular Americana.Kelley provides each of his exhibitions,series or projects with a philosophicallyrich, research-driven context, often in theform of a supporting text, whether a script,dialogue, statement or creative ction.

While an intermittent reader of the leadingFrench post-structuralists, including MICHELFOUCAULT , JACQUES DERRIDA , JacquesLacan and GILLES DELEUZE and FélixGuattari, Kelley has made limited specicrecourse to their ideas and methods. Thisis, in part, because one of his main areas ofinterest is in American popular cultures, anarea in which these writers produced little ofnote.

The most extensive of Kelley’sphilosophical concerns is a cluster of issuestheorized by Sigmund Freud and in laterpsychoanalytic and psychological writings.These include: Freudian concepts such as the‘death drive’ and ‘the uncanny’; repressionand Repressed and False Memory Syndrome;abjection, dirt and bodily ejecta. Kelley’spractice is one of the few interventions in thisarea by artists since the 1920s – interventions

which include automatism and work ofdreams by André Breton and the Surrealists;Salvador Dalí’s dissident ‘critical paranoia’;Jackson Pollock’s Jungianism; MARYKELLY’s work on language acquisition andpassages into the symbolic; and the varioustheories and practices of narcissism andtrauma developed in the 1990s.

Examining the history and postmodernreinvention of polychrome gurativesculpture, and offering an extended dialoguewith Freud’s 1919 text ‘The Uncanny’, Kelley’stwo exhibitions on the uncanny and his essay,

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‘Playing With Dead Things’ (1993), representone of the most elaborate visual analysesof a complex psychological experience. Headjudicates the effects of the uncanny withreference to the viewer’s experience of anumber of specic aesthetic, psychologicaland historical parameters: scale; colour; therelation of body part to whole; the relationof the body part to lack (which he terms, inironic homage to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘TheOrgans Without Body’); the effects of theready-made and ‘the double’; two aspectsof the statuary tradition – its correlationwith death and function as a surrogate; and,

nally, in a section titled ‘Aping the Mirrorof Nature’, in relation to naturalism andrealism.

The overlapping desiderata sustainingKelley’s selection of artworks and culturalobjects that generate uncanny effects canbe summarized as follows. First, the workor object must be apprehended physically,by a body encountering something that isbody-like – at least in a rst impression. This

implies, second, that the object should beroughly human-scaled, or viewed througha medium such as photography in which itcan be perceptually rescaled as ‘life-sized’;and, third, that the object be esh-colouredor wear normal clothing, because work inmonochromatic or non-naturalistic registerstends to resist identication and some formsof transference. Fourth, the texture of thesculpture or object should also betoken the

palpability of esh, as in wax or encausticgures.Kelley’s writings range from the notes,

diagrams and scripts that underwrotehis early performance pieces to ‘creative’and critical essays for art and alternative journals; catalogue essays; artist‘statements’; scripts for sound sculptures;libretti; dialogues (real and imagined); quasi-manifestos; numerous interviews (as bothinterviewer and interviewee); polemics; panelpresentations; screening introductions; radiobroadcasts; public lectures; CD liner notes;

invented case histories; and poster texts.Foul Perfection comprises two sections: rst,a series of discussions of artists generallyoutside the mainstream modernist and post-Conceptualist canon (David Askevold, ÖyvindFahlström, Doug Huebler, Survival ResearchLaboratories, Paul Thek and fellow artist-writer John Miller); second, thematic criticalessays (on caricature, architecture, UFOs,American lm and the Gothic sensibility ofthe late 1980s).

The statements, commentaries and ctionsthat constitute Minor Histories are morevarious, ranging from expository analyses

to declarative and persona-driven writings,such as ‘Goin’ Home, Goin’ Home’ (1995).The concatenation of puns, metaphorsand elisions that make up the ctive andexpressive register of Kelley’s writing havefew precedents in the avant-garde art world.Their closest relations might be the nonsensebroadsides and ‘lampisteries’ of TristanTzara. But although they have their anarchicmoments, Kelley’s texts don’t produce force

elds of senselessness and nihilism; theyoffer instead a relentless stream of psycho-semantically altered pop cultural clichés,governed by free associations trawledfrom the TV, brand names, high art tropesand other components of the Kelleyeaneveryday. The seepage of style and effectsof these texts into Kelley’s other workcreates a distinctive postmodern retort tothe experimental language of the manifesto

associated with the historical avant-garde.Several other artists of Kelley’s generation,BARBARA KRUGER , Richard Prince andSherrie Levine, also produced writings thatequivocate between ction and commentary– though theirs tend to be more abstract ornarrative-driven.

Following ‘Urban Gothic’ (1985), with itsdistinct aural and incantatory qualities,the style and form of his critical writingmodulated into a combination of rst-personcritical opinion, contextual observation andhistorical and thematic revisionism. What he

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terms the ‘library work’ that underwrites hisprojects in different media – his commitmentto research, compilation and citation, andits reassemblage, dismantling or explosion– remains a constant resource; and the notionof ‘poetic’ concentration or ‘condensation’emerges as the key gure of this continuity in‘idea generation’.

Kelley’s formative inuences includedthe Beats, especially the cut-up techniquesof William Burroughs, and early twentiethcentury avant-gardists like Tzara andRaymond Roussel. He has read extensivelyin Novalis and Lautréamont, Nathaniel

Hawthorne and Herman Melville, WilliamBeckford and Matthew Lewis, VladimirNobokov, Günter Grass, and WitoldGombrowicz. Among his own generation,Kelley supported the literary circle at BeyondBaroque in Venice, California, where DennisCooper, Amy Gerstler and Bob Flanaganmade regular appearances. Early on hisreading included the psychological studiesof R. D. Laing and Wilhem Reich; and, in

politics and social criticism, the Yippiemanifestos of Abbie Hoffman and JohnSinclair. He is also interested in fossilizedsystems of thought, like the theology ofThomas Aquinas, and pseudo- or out-of-datescientic constructions, including Jarry’s‘Pataphysics’ or the writings of Lucretius.With the exception of the ‘eccentrics’ ofthe genre – H. P. Lovecraft, P. K. Dick, J. G.Ballard – he dislikes science ction. Kelley

absorbed many lessons from these genres –appropriation, collage-composition, humourand irreverence, anti-institutionality, thediagnosis of repression, system construction(and parody) – all of which passed into his artpractice and the composition of his writings.

A key aspect of Kelley’s theory and writingis his negotiation with the modernist notionof collage, particularly the aesthetics offracture and structure associated with thenew novel and post-war experimental ction(Thomas Pynchon, Burroughs, Genet) aswell as with postmodern media practice.

Kelley separates the writing techniqueshe developed for performance from eitherJoycean stream of consciousness, or puremontage and ‘cut-up’ on the basis of hiscommitment to composition. Aware of thelimitations of fracturing strategies, Kelleypoints out that the aesthetic of disassembling‘ultimately fails as a strategy of resistancebecause it emulates the sped up and ecstaticeffects of the media itself’ (Tony OurslerINTROJECTION, p. 51). While he admits to theuse of ‘disruption . . . in a Brechtian sense’,which promotes ‘a return back to the real’,he opposes the solicitation of more radical

forms (as in the work of Burroughs), desiringinstead to arrange transitions between ‘astring of associations’. By simulating ‘naturalow’ Kelley aims to produce an ‘almostambient feel’ (Interview inLes Cahiers [LC], p.107).

In collaboration with McCarthy at theVienna Secession (Sod and Sodie Sock CompO.S.O., 1998), Kelley offered the notion offracture and collage, his most sustained

consideration, addressing the idea ofappropriated or appositional criticism.The artists’ selection of texts byGEORGESBATAILLE , Reich andCLEMENT GREENBERG‘in lieu of a catalogue’, is one of the manylayers of reference Kelley identies in theinstallation. Like the work, these texts can beread historically, formally, poetically or in anycombination. The act of assembling them,and the particular intensities with which they

might be consumed (or ignored) by viewers,read with or against each other, and with oragainst the work and its own contexts andreferences, reinforces Kelley’s own senseof relativity, his refusal to think about textsor objects in terms of their ‘content or theirtruth value’, but rather as complex entitieswith their own structures and histories, blindspots and illuminations. Using these texts‘for their poetic value’ but also as ‘a rationale’for the materials in the exhibition, Kelleynotes both his distrust of the denotativefunction of writing and that he has become

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progressively more involved in the ‘historicist’situation of texts, which superseded his‘interest in the formal aspects of . . . writing’.With the provocative notion of ‘socializedvisual communication’, Kelley attempts todraw the work, its forms, its audiences, itsconceptual and historical references and thewritings it occasions into a multi-layeredcompositional totality based on an open logicof association, consumption and repressivereturn (In conversation with Paul McCarthy etal. 1998).

The corrosive humour and irony in manyof his texts are caught up in another focus

of Kelley’s work, his conviction that art isconnected to ritual, and that one measure ofits power is founded on ‘a kind of structuralanalysis of the poetics of ritual’ (LC, p. 119).

Joining with his disavowal of traditionalwriterly excellence, and his intermittentlycantankerous style, Kelley’s refusal to acceptcanonical histories of contemporary art isone of several measures of his ‘badness’as a writer. But being bad is not simply aconcession Kelley ironically grants himself:it is a symptom of the difference betweennormative conventions and the artisticinection of a discourse. Kelley’s irtationwith what he terms ‘allowed bad writing’reaches for the strategic permissibilityof a ‘bad style’, the relative dysfunctionand opacity of which challenge the critical

operating systems that pass it by (Interviewwith John Miller, p. 8).

JOHN WELCHMAN

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary literature

Kelley, M., ‘Interview with John Miller (March21, 1991)’, inMike Kelley , New York: ArtResources Transfer, 1992.

Kelley, M., in conversation with Paul McCarthy,Martin Prinzhorn and Diedrich Diedrichsen,on the occasion of Sod and Sodie Sock CompO.S.O. (an exhibition with McCarthy), ViennaSecession, Sept. 23, 1998, transcript, pp. 2,6, 7.

Kelley, M., ‘An Endless Script: a conversationwith Tony Oursler’, in Deborah Rothschild,Tony Oursler INTROJECTION: Mid Career Survey1976–1999 , Williamstown: Williams CollegeMuseum of Art, 1999.

Kelley, M., ‘Interview with Jean-PhillippeAntoine’,Les Cahiers du Musée National d’artmoderne no. 73 (Fall 2000), p. 107.

Kelley, M.,Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism ,ed. John C. Welchman, Cambridge: MIT Press,2003.

Kelley, M.,Minor Histories: Statements,Conversations, Proposals , ed. John C.

Welchman, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.

Kelley, M.,Interviews, Conversations, and Chit-Chat , ed. John C. Welchman, Zurich, JRP/Ringier, 2005.

ExhibitionsThree Projects: Half a Man, From My Institution to

Yours, Pay for Your Pleasure , The RenaissanceSociety at the University of Chicago, Chicago,1988.

Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes , Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art, New York, 1993.

Mike Kelley , Museu d’Art Contemporani deBarcelona; Rooseum, Malmo, Sweden;Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, TheNetherlands, 1997.

Day is Done , Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2005.

Curated exhibitions

Mike Kelley: The Uncanny , Tate Liverpool,Liverpool; Museum Moderner Kunst StiftungLuwig, Vienna, 2004.


Welchman, J. C., et al., Mike Kelley , London:Phaidon, 1999 (texts by John C. Welchman,

Isabelle Graw, Anthony Vidler).

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For over thirty years, Mary Kelly hassustained an aesthetic, critical, intellectual,political project that has contributed tothe formation of what we now understandas art after modernism. In addition, hermonumental and thought-provokinginstallations have been the sites of seriousdebates concerning psychoanalysis and

feminism, maternal desire, feminine identityand, more recently, masculinity, war and theeffects of trauma. Kelly began her career inLondon in the early 1970s when a Marxist-feminist enquiry into the sexual division oflabour was beginning to be complementedby a study of psychoanalytic theories ofgender differentiation. She spent formativeyears in close contact with Juliet Mitchell(Psychoanalysis and Feminism , 1974) and

Laura Mulvey (‘Visual Pleasure and NarrativeCinema’, 1975). Her early work criticallyengaged with the practice of contemporarieslike JOSEPH KOSUTH and Art & Language,opening up their enquiries into the conditionsof art making onto wider social and politicalconcerns. She has been remarkably rigorousand consistent throughout her career, eventhough she moved back to the country ofher birth, the United States, in 1987, where

she worked rst with the Independent StudyProgram at the Whitney Museum of AmericanArt and then in the Department of Art atUCLA.

From 1970 to 1973, she collaborated onan unconventionally lmed documentaryabout women and work called NightCleaners . The scale, complexity, attentionto detail, duration and involvement innarrative which is possible in lm weretransposed by Kelly into a project-basedart of installation. Kelly lists some of theformal features of her work borrowed from

minimalist installation: ‘the fragmentationof the visual eld, the imposition of atemporal sequence, the intrusion ofperipheral vision, the ephemeral effect oflight, and above all the physical presenceof the viewer in the installation’ ( ImagingDesir e [IG], p. xxiv). Her work is a hybrid ofconceptual and minimalist practices. Post-

Partum Document (1973–79) and Interim (1984–89) were long-term projects that rstappeared in instalments. Her subject matterdemanded, as she has said, ‘a rupture ofthe single, rather seamless, artifact’. Sheborrowed from lm and conceptual art theuse of multiple registers of signication.Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965)seems in retrospect like a prescription forsuch a practice, consisting as it does of

a chair, a photograph of it and dictionarydenition on a panel. But Kosuth didn’t usethe heterogeneity of the sign (found object,photograph, text) to expound anything beyondthe art-idea itself. Kelly brought the potentialof these various registers and their affectivedifferences to bear on the presentation ofextra-artistic subject matter.

Kelly’s specic intellectual and politicalformation meant that she has always refused

any notion of an essential femininity outsideof the constitutive social institutions of family,language and the law, and this had certainconsequences for her art practice. Herdistinctive avoidance of iconic representationsof women is partly a response to this‘constructivist’ feminist position. The writingsof Jacques Lacan have been very importantin her effort to rethink the relationshipbetween art practice and psychoanalysis.His imagination of the unconscious asstructured like a language recommendeditself to her project of trying to represent,

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using the means of conceptual art, thesubjective dimension of women’s oppression.Following Lacan’s theory of the mirror stageof infantile development, she held that thekind of feminist art practice which offers‘empowering’ iconic representations of thewoman’s body risked delivering up the femalespectator to identications with an idealmother, an illusory mirror image of herselfas whole, self-sufcient and autonomous– in short, a female version of the bourgeoissubject. She has also vigorously critiquedsome women’s body and performanceart and this has led to a lively and still

ongoing debate about the relative merits oftransgressive performance-based work asopposed to Kelly’s more austere and obliqueart practice.

This debate is often played out in termsof a transatlantic divide with Judy Chicago’sDinner Party (1973–79) positioned oppositethe exactly contemporary Post-PartumDocument . It is also couched in terms ofa generational shift. Some accounts of

women’s art of the late 1970s and 1980sdrive a wedge between the work of an oldergeneration of ‘iconoclastic’ artists allied withconceptualism whose work is a critique ofomnipresent media images of woman, ‘cutto the measure of male desire’, as LauraMulvey put it, and a younger generationwho have no misgivings about appropriatingthese images and playing with them. Kellyis frequently cited as exemplary of the rst;

Cindy Sherman’s performative photographicwork is often invoked to represent the latter.Although this has been a contested issue forsome time, Amelia Jones recently reanimatedit by responding, in her Body Art: Performingthe Subject (1998), to Kelly’s critique of 1970sperformance work, ‘Re-viewing ModernistCriticism’ (1981).

Kelly’s important essay intervened inthe context of a revival of painting and thecommercial gallery system in the early 1980sthat threatened to eclipse radical, explicitlyanti-expressionist, minimalist, conceptual

and photographic practices. Her strategywas to relate that work and performanceto the modernist pictorial paradigm. Thatparadigm, dened by CLEMENT GREENBERG

and Harold Rosenberg, among others,insists on the unity and homogeneity of thepicture which is understood as expressingthe essential creativity of the subject. Thepainterly gesture is intended ‘to mark thesubjectivity of the artist in the image itself’(IG, p. 83). If Jackson Pollock left a painterlytrace of an expressive gesture, argued Kelly,then the artistic subject appeared in anotherform in the 1970s: ‘In performance work

it is no longer a question of investing theobject with an artistic presence: the artist is present and creative subjectivity is given asthe effect of an essential self-possession’(IG, p. 91). In many cases the body’s authenticpresence is guaranteed by the experience ofpain. Although there were some prominentmale performance artists who staged actsof self-mutilation, the similarities betweenwomen’s performance work of this nature

and traditional representations of femalemasochism made its political effectivityquestionable. The problematic character ofspecically feminist performance lies not inrepresentations of pain, but in the temptationto equate the female body and feminineidentity, as though it were a biological giveninstead of a cultural artefact. Further, theinsistent presence of the artist encouragesa critical practice that, as Kelly put it,

converges ‘on the traditional vanishing pointof the artistic subject’ ( IG, p. 98). Recently,this has in turn l ed to the rise of a rst-person, confessional, performative criticalpractice.

GRISELDA POLLOCK agreed with Kelly in‘Screening the Seventies’, where she notedthat it is difcult to distance the image ofwoman sufciently in order to attain therequired critical view. Amelia Jones, however,countered these claims by critiquing whatshe saw as an overly prescriptive denitionof what counts as feminist art practice, and

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by rehabilitating ‘anti-Brechtian’ formsof solicitation of the gaze in body art. Theembodiment of the artistic subject, on thisview, makes difference and identities ofall kinds palpable and destabilizes bothmodernist and postmodernist (or post-structuralist) sensibilities. One way of goingbeyond the terms of this debate is to appealto the difference between performance and performativity . ‘Performance’ is a uniqueand spontaneous event in the present tensethat cannot be adequately captured onlm or video. ‘Performativity’, by contrast,signals an awareness of the way the present

gesture is always an iteration or repetitionof preceding acts. It therefore points to thecollective dimension of speech and action.Many, though not all, of the artists admiredby Jones, such as Laurie Anderson, aredistinctly performative body artists, whotake pains to distance and mediate theirown image, and thereby escape Kelly’s andPollock’s strictures.

In fact, Kelly’s art practice is not as de-

personalized as her critique of performancemight make it seem. After all, she alsocriticized the way conceptual artists tendedto assume an authoritative position outsideof the eld of their investigations: they‘stopped dramatically short of synthesizingthe subjective moment into that inquiry’ ( IG,p. xx). Kelly brought to conceptual art thequestion of the subject and gender difference,including her own subjective experience

of that difference. Indeed, her enquiry intomaternity in Post-Partum Document wasoccasioned by the birth of her son andInterim , about ageing and the fear of losingone’s femininity, related many personalanecdotes and displayed photographs ofitems of her own clothes. However, these‘researches’ are, for her, the raw materialfor nished works whose ambition is moreof the order of history painting than self-portraiture. Kelly’s work is characterizedby formal restraint, intellectual rigour andexplosive emotional content.

Kelly recently described her workingprocedure to Judi Carlson in an interviewabout the rst of her installations composedof panels of compressed lint, Mea Culpa (2000). This installation was a continuation,or, better, the other side of Gloria Patri (1992),which investigated the masks of masculinityagainst the backdrop of the Gulf War. MeaCulpa (I am Guilty) is about the victimsof oppression and war. It began with theaccumulation of an archive of war-relatedatrocities. But her interest was, she says,primarily in an ‘interrogation of my ownpreoccupation with these events’ (Carson’s

‘Interview with Mary Kelly’, p. 75). She wasinterested in the traumatic effects of thefragmentary reports of atrocities, images ofdistant disasters, which are transmitted intoour everyday domestic lives. The curious greywaves that festoon the walls of the galleryturn out, on closer inspection, to be repeated‘ready-made’ modules of compacted lintcarefully harvested from her tumble dryer. Ineffect, Kelly turned the dryer into a primitive

printmaking device, using it to ‘silkscreen’,with a dark load of laundry, tersely writtenshort stories of torture and atrocity aroundthe globe. Rather than circulate photo-documents of these stories, Kelly has madethe lint residue suggest some soft andvulnerable substance where the traumaticinformation is ltered and inscribed. Thework is an attempt to give mediatized, de-realized news stories the texture of the real

– a fragile, soft monument. Rather thanrepeat the spectacle of horror, give the literalimage, Kelly conjures up a sense of a mufedvoice.

This anti-literalism is perhaps theforemost motive for Kelly’s aniconic practice.She has said of Post-Partum Document , thatshe want ed to represent the ‘affective force’,rather than the literal form of the mother–child relationship. Her interest in spectrumsof affect off the visible scale no doubt led herto collaborate with the composer, MichaelNyman. The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhapi (2001),

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another lint installation arranged in the formof a sound wave, is about a child lost andfound amidst the battleelds of Kosovo. Theexhibition opened with a live performanceof the original music composed for Kelly’slibretto. All of Kelly’s art attempts therepresentation of psychic effects as these are

ciphered through social formations. In short,her installations are visualizations of theunconscious. Because Kelly’s subject matteris strictly unrepresentable, her art hovers atthe edge of the image.

MARGARET IVERSEN

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary literature

Kelly, M., ‘Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism’,Screen vol. 22, no. 3 (1981); reprinted inImaging Desire , 1996.

Kelly, M., Interim , New York: New Museum ofContemporary Art, 1990.

Kelly, M., Gloria Patri , Ithaca, N.Y.: Herbert F.Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University,1992.

Kelly, M., Imaging Desire: Mary Kelly SelectedWritings , Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.

Kelly, M., Post-Partum Document , London:Routledge, 1983; reprinted Berkeley:University of California Press; Vienna:Generali Foundation, 1998.

Kelly, M., ‘Mea Culpa’, October 93 (Summer2000).


Adams, P., ‘The Art of Analysis: Mary Kelly’sInterim and the Discourse of the Analyst’, in

The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis

and Sexual Image , London: Routledge,1996.Carson, J., ‘Interview with Mary Kelly’, Art Journal

59 (Winter 1999).Iversen, M., Crimp, D. and Bhabha, H. K., Mary

Kelly , London: Phaidon, 1997 (containschronology and bibliography).

Jones, Amelia., Body Art: Performing the Subject ,Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1998.

Mastai, J., Pollock, G. and Wollen, P., SocialProcess Collaborative Action: Mary Kelly1970–75 , Vancouver: Charles H. ScottGallery, Emily Carr Institute of Art andDesign, 1997.

Mulvey, L., ‘Impending Time’, (1986) in L. Mulvey,Visual and Other Pleasures , Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1989, pp. 148–58.

Pollock, G., ‘Screening the Seventies: Sexualityand Representation in Feminist Practice– a Brechtian Perspective’, in Vision andDif ference: Femininity, Feminism andthe Histories of Art , London: Routledge,1987.

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Joseph Kosuth, born in Toledo, Ohio, USA,is one of the key gures in Conceptual art.Kosuth’s signicance rests principally onartworks and writings produced between1966 and 1975. The artist’s current workcontinues to reect its origins in a larger eldof Conceptual art practices that sought toliberate art from the theories and criticism

of modernism as exemplied by the writingsof CLEMENT GREENBERG and MICHAELFRIED . Throughout the late 1960s and early1970s, Kosuth (i) stressed the need for an artpractice that reected on its status as art;(ii) identied the principal role of the artistas a maker of meaning; and (iii) throughthe example of his own writings and self-promotional activities, challenged artists toscrupulously control the critical reception of

their work.In Kosuth’s view, Conceptual art worthy ofthe name – also referred to as ‘theoreticalConceptual art’ in his writings of the 1970s– must remain unencumbered by traditionalpractices such as painting or sculptureand their attendant critical and aestheticdiscourses. (Kosuth instances On Kawara’sdate paintings as an exception to thisprohibition because here painting is pursued

in an intentionally self-reexive manner andcan be read as a parody of such media.)Since the late 1960s, Kosuth’s writings

have aimed to further rene the distinctionbetween Conceptual art and all other modesof art practice, avant-garde and traditional.During the 1970s, Kosuth turned a purifyingpolemic on Conceptual art itself, resultingin the distinction between ‘theoretical’Conceptual art and ‘stylistic’ Conceptualart. The former, asserted Kosuth, was theonly model able to illuminate the essentialkernel of art’s reality by virtue of its being a

self-reexive critical practice that takes asits subject the condition of art, rather thanthe subject position of artist or spectator.For Kosuth, Conceptual art is essentially anobjective investigation into all aspects of theconcept ‘art’ – its social context, its logicalform and its relationship to the wider culture.Above all, Conceptual art enables us to

understand how art functions as a signifyingprocess, rather than how the concept artexpresses itself through any particularmedia. Conceptual art as conceived by Kosuthis claimed to be an overarching, transparentand objective intellectual tool – not simplya critical response to existing practice,but a meta-theory of artistic practice ingeneral. The work of the artist is framed asan investigative activity that is advanced by

whatever intellectual resources are deemednecessary to demystify conventional artpractices and reveal the signifying functionof art.

One of Kosuth’s most controversialclaims addresses the nature and function ofConceptual art’s public. As Kosuth famouslynotes, the public of this practice is ideallycomprised solely of other artists. Thisnarrowing of the public of Conceptual art

has a number of consequences. First, thereis potentially no member of the audience ofConceptual art who is not, at one and thesame time, a participant in the making ofthat art. Because of the absence of a laypublic, Conceptual art can be claimed to beas ‘serious’ as science or philosophy. Thesedisciplines, claims Kosuth, also have no needfor a public outside that of the immediatepractitioners. Finally, as an experimentalpractice, Conceptual art cannot be expectedto have a direct effect on society at large.Taken together, these assumptions were

JOSEPH KOSUTH (1945–)

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intended to announce the redundancy of theart historian and art critic as the principalagents for the interpretation and propagationof Conceptual art.

Kosuth maintains that an understanding ofthe signifying nature of all art propositions isfundamental to Conceptual art and justiesits dependence upon inscribed language asits principal mode of expression. (At the sametime, it is crucial to distinguish Conceptualart from other, language-based artisticforms, such as concrete poetry. These aredismissed by Kosuth as a formalization of thepoet’s material.)

As cognitive rather than perceptualpractice, Kosuth boldly positions Conceptualart as a rival to both philosophy and religion.Kosuth repeatedly asserts in his writingsthe right of Conceptual art to be valuedon a par with logic, mathematics, science,anthropology or psychoanalytic theory,arguing that all these enquiries share withConceptual art the qualities of being open-ended and theoretical. Kosuth’s notion of

Conceptual art also privileges language asthe key frame for meaning in all art, pastor present, and regardless of its materialform. The crux of Kosuth’s argument linkingart with mathematics and science is thatall these practices are in a profound sensetautological, and all present their ‘ndings’ tothe world in the allegedly universal syntax ofanalytical propositions.

This last claim is most controversial

and Kosuth goes further in his attack onthe epistemological distinction betweenart and science than any other artist of hisgeneration. When Kosuth argues that art isa special kind of tautology, he means art asrevealed by his practice of Conceptual art.Like logic and mathematics, Conceptual artdemands that the art-idea (or work) andthe concept of art are identical and self-validating. However, as pointed out by criticssuch as BENJAMIN BUCHLOH and FrancesColpitt, such a theor etical construction of artfundamentally undermines Kosuth’s claim

for his practice as a thoroughgoing critique offormalist art.

Kosuth’s quintessential statement on thenature of art as a concept is found in theseminal text, ‘Art After Philosophy’ (1969).‘Works of art’, writes Kosuth, ‘are analyticpropositions. That is, if viewed within theircontext – as art – they provide no informationwhat-so-ever about any matter of fact.A work of art is a tautology in that it is apresentation of the artist’s intention, that is,he is saying that a particular work of art is art, which means, is a denition of art. Thus,that it is art is true a priori (which is what

[Donald] Judd means when he s tates that “ifsomeone calls it art, it’s art”).’

At times obscure, Kosuth’s art theory isabove all playful and informal, remainingunencumbered by the strictures of thedisciplines he seeks to emulate. Drawingon Ad Reinhardt’s penchant for composingpolemics out of series of quotations sourcedfrom a wide range of thinkers, artistsand poets, Kosuth likewise appropriates

fragments of texts by key gures in thephilosophy of language (analytic philosophyand the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein), thephilosophy of science, anthropology (the ideaspopularized by Stanley Diamond), Marxism,critical theory ( WALTER BENJAMIN ) andpsychoanalytic theory (Sigmund Freud).This practice of citation has prompted somecritics to brand Kosuth as either pedantic orintellectually vacuous. Yet, the interest shown

by Kosuth in resources of expression thatare remote from the expected discoursesof art and which reect a vocabulary andmethodology alien to modernist art criticismof the 1960s is hardly unique among artists.Many artists at the time irted with a kind ofcod-intellectualism or scientism. Kosuth’stext fragments picture the case for theepistemological identity of self-reexiveConceptual art and the logical structure ofphilosophy, science and mathematics. Ratherthan settle the argument of art’s identity, theypoint to a possible world where art, science,

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philosophy, and so forth, jostle together ascultural equals.

This intention is announced in one ofthe earliest of Kosuth’s works of art – or‘investigations’ as he called them from 1968onwards – subtitled ‘Art as Idea as Idea’.Consisting simply of negative photographicprints of dictionary denitions four-by-fourfeet square, these works refer explicitly toReinhardt’s dictum – ‘Art-is-art; everythingelse is everything else’ – and mirror theformat of his late, near-black paintings.Along with Marcel Duchamp, Reinhardtwas identied by Kosuth as a key historical

precursor to Conceptual art. In an act ofhomage to Duchamp’s ‘ready-mades’ of1913, Kosuth calls his appropriated textconstruction the ‘made-ready’. Theseknowing historical references remain thedominant format of Kosuth’s most widelyread art theoretical texts and serve to linkhim to a particular avant-garde tradition.

For Kosuth, the chief virtue of Conceptualart is to be found in its opposition to the

formalist and allegedly ‘empty’ (or ‘rst-order’) works of painters and sculptorssuch as Kenneth Noland, Larry Poons andAnthony Caro. Formalism was bankrupt,in Kosuth’s view, because it was unable toreect upon the concept of art in generaland left the artist in a position of dependencewith respect to the art critic. As construedby Greenberg and Fried, modernist paintingand sculpture is eminently self-reexive;

that is, such art eschews all illusory spatialeffects and references to anything outsidethe fact of its material constitution, be itpainting or sculpture. This was seen by someConceptual artists to be an impoverishedself-reexivity, one that prevented artistsfrom understanding how art ‘means’. Withits repetitive geometric motifs, relativelack of internal complexity, emphasis onmedia specicity, and opulent use of colour,formalist paintings and sculptures weredisdained as meaningless objects whosevery lack of complexity and detail presented

a blank screen upon which critics couldratify their narrow taste. Formalist paintingand sculpture was conceptually mute andpresented a stumbling block to a higherunderstanding of art.

While Kosuth’s early writings addressformalism in these terms, his associationwith the Art & Language group in 1970 forcedhim to reconsider earlier positions and ledto an accommodation of his art theory to afar more dialogical and politicized model ofpractice. Despite this shift, Kosuth’s versionof Conceptual art remained highly abstractand obscure. The academic seriousness and

philosophical respectability projected byKosuth’s works from the late 1960s onwardshas done much to contribute to the view ofConceptual art as a practice of difculty andremoteness with respect to lived experience.

Ironically, the stereotypical image ofthe clinical Conceptual artist is potentiallymoderated by one of the more enduringaspects of Kosuth’s career as an artist,namely an insistence on the cohesiveness

of his various practices. Here, Kosuthunderscores the fundamentally organicrelationship that binds his role as artist,curator, writer and educator into a wholesocial actor. These roles not only reectthe urge towards a more complete andsatisfying personal practice that resists theprerogatives of professional specialization,but also refer to the historical need ofConceptual artists to control directly the

reception of their work. Kosuth, like manyothers of his generation, emulated themultifaceted practices of Ad Reinhardt,ROBERT MORRIS and Donald Judd. Byaggr essively controlling the terms of criticaldiscourse that framed his own practices,and by providing a context during the late1960s for the practices of his artistic allies,Kosuth could counter the interpretations byhostile critics that threatened to marginalizeConceptual art. According to Kosuth, theextraordinary versatility of Reinhardt wasa tremendous inuence on the way he

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Barbara Kruger is best known for her photo-

text collages. These combine photographs,often culled from 1940s and 1950s photo-annuals and instruction manuals, with

provocative slogans in Futura Bold Italic font.

They have appeared on posters, billboards,magazine covers, book jackets, bags, T-shirtsand mugs, in galleries and outside in various

shaped his own career. Reinhardt, in fact,was a painter, a political cartoonist andactivist, a writer, a student of art history,and a professor of art history. But whereReinhardt’s versatility acknowledges thepractical differences of these roles andtherefore maintains strict epistemological

divisions between them, Kosuth’s versiontends to be far more cohesive and self-contained. In one sense, it can be reckonedto be the social face of the tautology ‘art-as-idea-as-idea’.

MICHAEL CORRIS

BARBARA KRUGER(1945–)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary literature

Kosuth, J., Investigationen über Kunst und‘Problemkreise’ set 1965 (5 vols), Lucerne:Kunstmuseum Luzern, 1973.

Kosuth, J., Art after Philosophy and After. CollectedWritings, 1966–1990, ed. Gabriele Guercio,Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993/2002.


Corris, M. (ed.), Conceptual Art: Theory, Mythand Practice , Cambridge and New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Gintz, C. and Pagé, S., L’art conceptuel: une perspective , Paris: Museum of Modern Art,1989.

Goldstein, A. and Rorimer, A., Reconsidering theObject of Art: 1965–1975 , Los Angeles: TheMuseum of Contemporary Art and Cambridge:MIT Press, 1995.

Harrison, C., Essays on Art & Language,Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.

Lippard, L. R., Six Years: The Dematerializationof the Art Object, 1966–1972, Berkeley andLos Angeles: University of California Press,1973/1997.

Meyer, U., Conceptual Art, New York: E. P. Dutton,1972.

Wood, P., Conceptual Art, London: Tate

Publishing, 2002.

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urban settings. Summoning the graphiclanguage of the modernist avant-garde (e.g.John Hearteld, Soviet Constructivism), theyalso invoke the tactics of commercial design.

Kruger’s art career began in the late1960s when she made crocheted andsewn hangings for gallery display. Thesechallenged separations between art andcraft, thereby probing relationships betweencreativity and gender. This interest in feministconcerns segued with issues specic tophotographic theory when, during a visitingartist post at Berkeley in 1976, Krugerengaged with the writings of WALTER

BENJAMIN and ROLAND BARTHES and theirrespective analyses of technically reproducedart and semiotics. Alongside her art practice,Kruger has taught, curated and written. Forseveral years she regularly wrote criticismfor Artforum, mainly reecting on TV andlm. Her criticism revels in discussions ofTV otsam such as The Muppets, JohnnyCarson and The Home Shopping Club, and isseeded with gestures to critical theory, for

example, commodity fetishism, the rhetoricof realism, and the identicatory mechanismsof camerawork. In interview Kruger hasdescribed her critical project thus: ‘I’minterested in how identities are constructed,how stereotypes are formed, how narrativessort of congeal and become history’ ( BarbaraKruger [BK ], p. 189). Her reection on herown practice is often allusive and adoptsa similar tone to that of the slogans in the

photo-collages. Witness, for example, theparatactic statements in ‘Irony/Passion’(1979), ‘Work and Money’ (1981), ‘Incorrect’(1982) and ‘Repeat After Me’ (1992), allreproduced in Remote Control (1993).

Kruger began her career as a graphicdesigner at Condé Nast, becoming headdesigner of Mademoiselle by 1967 andworking subsequently on House and Gardenand Aperture . Carol Squiers stresses howKruger’s art practice emerged ‘directly’from her training in selecting and croppingimages ( BK , p. 147). Eschewing distinctions

between art and design, Kruger statessimply that she works with ‘pictures andwords’. However, Kruger’s practice involvesmoves uncommon within traditional artpractice. For example, her use of previouslyexisting image sources (which largely avoidcopyright) raises questions about authorshipand originality. In this respect her work canbe grouped

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