Recoding of Information, Knowledge and Technology • M.Corris \

by Michael Corris

The following examines how some Conceptual art recoded, redescribed and ironized the theories that helped to drive and justify the technological revolution of the 1960s.^[1] At the outset, we should note the intense interaction during the 1950s and 1960s between the modernizing discourse of technology and all forms of culture and visual art. Indeed, the emergence during the 1960s of Conceptual art coincided with a tremendous surge in economic activity in North America and Western Europe that “seemed powered by technological revolution”.^[2] John F. Kennedy’s “new frontier” and Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology” were images that were intended to denote and exploit the appeal of technological innovation in the mind of the electorate.^[3]

Writing on the period of post-war prosperity that began in the US in 1945 and reached its peak around 1970, historian Eric Hobsbawm offers three observations on the distinctive social and economic effects of this technological leap. Firstly, the utter transformation of everyday life in the industrialized nations and, to a lesser extent, in the developing world; secondly, the new centrality of ‘Research and Development’ (R&D) to the economic growth of the industrialized nations; and thirdly, the structural effect on the labour market of the new, capital-intensive technologies. It is this last feature that prompted the period’s technocrats to dream of “production, or even service, without humans” and to speculate on the prospect of human beings as “essential to such an economy only in one respect: as buyers of goods and services”.^[4] Even though the “restructuring of capitalism and the advance in economic internationalization” are probably more central to our understanding of this broad period of economic expansion, it was the image and promise of technology – in particular, the view of a radically reduced concept of the human being as social agent – that captured the intellectual, popular and artistic imagination of the West. In the United States, the development of technology and the dissemination of the technocrat’s dream of a regimented society of consumers was fuelled, on the one hand, by the growing power and influence of corporations and, on the other, by the “military-industrial complex”. The marriage of Cold War foreign policy and private sector enterprise sustained America’s military advantage and guaranteed a steady flow of resources to support appropriate technological developments. Alongside the many programs initiated to develop weaponry and communications systems, a parallel stream of research funding was made available to disciplines such as linguistic theory and pure mathematics. These fields of theoretical research were the recipients of strategic State funding, which aimed to steer the production of knowledge into avenues that might yield results applicable to the future development and production of high-speed electronic computing machines, electronic communications systems, exotic new weapons, powerful information processing programs, and encryption devices. Many of the innovators in the field of game theory, information retrieval, modal logic and transformational grammar pursued initial research under the aegis of this rich stream of State and NATO-sponsored funding.

During the 1960s such theories dominated the intellectual landscape and quickly became the object of social and political controversy. Systems theory in particular gripped the 1960s imagination. Typically associated with the aims and objectives of the military or corporate management, systems theory was first promoted in a generalized form “capable of addressing patterns of human life” by the mathematician and inventor of cybernetics, Norbert Weiner. Cybernetics – conceived by Weiner during the 1940s in the context of military research on improved radar systems – is essentially a theory of control based on the concept of the feedback loop, whereby a system is in a state of dynamic monitoring and adjustment of its performance with respect to a specified goal. According to Weiner, “the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback”.^[5] The biological analogue to cybernetics is homeostasis, the processes through which an organism is able to maintain itself in a state of dynamic equilibrium with its environment.

The concept of a “system,” which became part of the lingua franca of the 1960s, was not destined to remain the exclusive property of a technologically minded elite of engineers, scientists and mathematicians. In the hands of intellectuals, artists and political activists, it would become an essential ideological component of the “cultural revolution”. It is generally agreed, for example, that Robert Smithson’s obsession with inorganic molecular structures (crystals), geological processes, time, and entropy – the latter being a concept derived from classical thermodynamics but also performing a central role in communication theory – represented a strong cultural challenge to technology’s progressive self-image. The British art critic Lawrence Alloway likened the production, distribution and consumption of art to a non-hierarchical network, “a shifting multiple goal coalition”, and supported his claim by citing the work of industrial psychologists and sociologists.^[6] Systems theory also figured prominently in the student revolt of the 1960s. Historian Howard Brick argues that “by the late 1960s students in American universities and colleges easily grasped the concept of a ‘system’”.^[7] In the volatile atmosphere of confrontation with the Establishment, the term itself – which simply denotes the “orderly processes at work in any complex array of multiple, interacting variables, be it a living organism, an environmental milieu, or a computing machine” – would be demonized. The meaning of the term “system” was highly inflected politically and its application to the flux of human affairs or the natural environment was strongly contested. Opposing or counter-culture meanings of system theory typically emphasized a consciousness of "'connections' among diverse social problems" indicating that “the flaws in society were fundamental, endemic – not incidental”.^[8] Despite its origins in the field of weapons research, social activists, environmentalists, student radicals and artists appropriated the term and used it to effectively polarize social discourse.

What was art’s response to a set of technocratic theories, ideologies and new structures of intellectual production (such as the “think tank”) that seemed to be committed collectively to the transformation of people into objects of “technical and administrative measures?”^[9] Not all artists believed that such knowledge and technology was indelibly tainted. In the visual arts, some practitioners were more inclined to celebrate technology and to read the growing influence of the social sciences as a sign of society’s rapid modernization, a future imagined as “a technologically utopian structure of feeling, positivistic and 'scientistic'".^[10] These artists sought to emphasise how the enlightened application of these new social and scientific theories – particularly semiotic theory, whose dream “had been the quest for inter-disciplinary forms, which would cross different types of human forms of expressions”^[11] – could achieve socially progressive ends. Roy Ascott established his innovative “Ground Course” at Ealing College in 1961 in the hope that a reorientation of art education informed by cybernetics, semiotics, and other theories of communication would form the basis for a new visual sensibility. The enthusiasm displayed by Ascott for graphic notations as diagrams of a “new space” had its counterpart in the American field of Conceptual art, which Robert C. Hobbs characterizes as the aestheticization of knowledge and the fetishization of “quasi-scientific” (objective) modes of display.^[12] In 1967, the British artist Stephen Willats argued that intellectual resources drawn from “modern information areas” such as psychology and communication theory would enable the artist to “look at such important issues as audience composition”, and the relation between the concerns of art and those of its audience. Willats envisaged a practice of art that “structured function as an integral part of the environment”.^[13] In 1971, he wrote that “the development of homeostatic, self-regulating, self-assessing systems has been one of the most important conceptual developments in respect of behavioural structures, for it is in the nature of these systems that they are capable of determining their own structural relationship between input and output”.^[14] Such rhetoric, of course, can be applied as well to the operations of a modest thermostat. Yet, we are able to point to vivid and complex examples of artists adopting the strategies and intellectual resources that commonly characterize the culture of corporate research and development or policy institutes. For example, the reconfiguration of the “think tank” and the modern corporate figure of the management consultant were drawn upon respectively by Robert Smithson and the British artists John Latham and Barbara Stevini, co-founders in 1966 of the Artists Placement Group.^[15]

Other artists undoubtedly took a more benign approach to the concept of a system, using it to denote a set of parameters or rules that can impart the image of structure and motive to artistic practices that are invariably performative and contingent. Such work was constituted through moments of social encounter and interaction, rather than through the disposition of materials. The concept of a template or schema – already familiar to Conceptual art, as the work of Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, Hanne Darboven, Douglas Huebler and On Kawara attests – provided an armature on which to organize a variety of social scenarios. Examples include Lee Lozano’s Dialogue Piece initiated in 1969, and some of the early projects of Vito Acconci. Acconci – not ordinarily associated with systems theory as such – organized performances in the late 1960s that placed the person of the artist into a pre-existing situation or social circuit, “something that already existed”.^[16] Acconci’s contribution to the Museum of Modern Art’s 1970 exhibition Information was a structured performance that the artist described as a “mail system-museum-exhibition-system”. Other works by Acconci, such as his solitary physical self-improvement performances, display an absurdist tinge linking him with artists who were far more interested to undermine the social authority of systems theory through parody, pushing the application of a system to the point of absurdity. Systems theory, cybernetics and game theory were misrepresented and diminished by a strategy of over-generalization whereby the most banal situations of everyday life would be subjected to isolation, rationalization, and analysis in a travesty of corporate efficiency or military control. One example is the early work of David Askevold – Three Spot Game (1968), Shoot Don’t Shoot (A Sum Zero Game Matrix) (1970), and Taming Expansion (1971) – which is consciously modelled after a simple game theory decision matrix.

The holistic insight that all systems, regardless of size or complexity, are interconnected lurks at the heart of systems theory. This insight was mercilessly exaggerated to the point of paranoia in the novels of Thomas Pynchon, such as The Crying of Lot 49 and V. Earlier, Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File – the 1962 literary debut of an ex-Royal College of Art student turned novelist – anticipated “the synthesised environment of technological fantasy only so far as the severely bureaucratic, hierarchical and class aspects of British culture would permit”.^[17] Even the influential work in America of George Brecht and John Cage – which Robert Morris characterized in the late-1960s as the “final secularization” of art and systems of chance – may be read as an indictment of technocratic and bureaucratic modalities of control.^[18] It was a defiant statement of the poverty of such a world-view, a warning about the hubris of all attempts to overcome indeterminacy, and an encouraging sign that led to the innovation by some Conceptual artists of more explicitly “democratically” structured artworks and situations.

The engagement of Conceptual artists with systems theory, information theory, cybernetics, and electronic technology had a real basis in ideological and social conflict, though at times it seemed to be the result of contingency. Jack Burnham argues that Hans Haacke “wanted to reveal the way the world functions on its most essential levels”.^[19] Haacke took as his subject matter the totality of all systems, regardless of their nature as physical, biological, or social, though his work before around 1968 concentrated on the first two categories. Haacke’s central artistic strategy has been defined as the “production of systems, the interference with and the exposure of existing systems”.^[20] He is concerned with the “operational structure of organizations, in which transfer of information, energy, and/or material occurs”.^[21] Fredric Jameson has compared Haacke’s methodology to homeopathy, writing that the artist “poses the political dilemma of a new cultural politics: how to struggle within the world of the simulacrum by using the arms and weapons specific to that world which are themselves very precisely simulacra”.^[22] Provoked by the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 and referring to the utility of so-called “political art”, Haacke expressed the belief that “the production and the talk about sculpture has nothing to do with the urgent problems of our society . . . we must face the fact that art is unsuited as a political tool”.^[23] The artist stressed that “any work done with and in a given social situation cannot remain detached from its cultural and ideological context”.^[24]

Haacke’s challenge to the perceived ethical constraints imposed on art by a particularly narrow sense of professionalism is enabled, in large measure, by an embrace of systems theory and systems “thinking”. In particular, it is the concept of an ecosystem that is most relevant to Haacke’s projects of the early 1970s, imparting a sense of structure and coherence on works such as 10 Turtles Set Free (1970) and Goat Feeding in Woods, Thus Changing It (1970). Beach Pollution (1970) – a pile of driftwood and other rubbish that had been collected on a Spanish seafront – not only signals Haacke’s concern with environmental issues, but also initiates a dialogue with the anti-formalism of the late 1960s. Visually, Beach Pollution is a work that seems to invite an experience of “unmediated physical encounter with matter, an encounter unfettered by language and a priori assumptions”^[25] similar to that intended by Robert Morris in his work Threadwaste (1968). Yet, what distinguishes Haacke’s work is not its physical composition as a pile of scavenged rubbish; rather, its conceptual relationship to the exogenous cultural space of the emerging environmental movement. That such a difference is not available to visual inspection, but is constituted through language, marks a significant shift away from the phenomenological claims of Minimalism.

Conceptual art’s critique of Modernism was “frequently expressed in terms of a desire for art to emulate the intellectual rigor of academic disciplines and took the form of fetishized modes of the scientific display of knowledge”. In his essay “Affluence, Taste, and the Brokering of Knowledge: Notes on the Social Context of Early Conceptual Art”, Robert C. Hobbs examines “this anxious intersection of art with a particularly influential vision of post-war American society”. Hobbs’s text distances itself from accounts of Conceptual art that seek its origins in an aesthetic response to Minimal art or which claim that all Conceptual art was conceived in opposition to the cultural values of mainstream American culture. Hobbs argues convincingly against these monolithic views, pointing out, for example, how a reductive form of Conceptual art – exemplified in the work of Joseph Kosuth – complemented a contemporary taste for uncluttered simplicity, an aesthetic the author identifies with an interest in quasi-Japanese interior design. In common with Minimal art, some aspects of Conceptual art always seemed to be at risk of falling back into a comfortable relationship with the culture at large. This is not to say that those aspects of Conceptual art which are redolent of the logic and visual appearance of administrative systems are necessarily complicit with the aims and objectives of late-capitalist society. Rather, it may have been the case that some forms of Conceptual art learned the lessons of Pop Art too well, succumbing too readily to a fascination with taste, fashion, and the media from the vantage point of the cultural space of “high” art. “Instead of feigning an elaborate costume when actually undressed”, writes Hobbs, “this new art assumed the camouflage of the commonplace which made it appear dematerialized”.^[26] Hobbs argues against the notion of Conceptual art as a practice primarily concerned with the creation of a type of meta-art; instead, he prefers to map its aesthetic onto a number of broader social shifts in middle-class taste that took place during the 1960s. By doing so, Hobbs illuminates a set of social, economic and ideological conditions that were common to both American and British artists.

Briony Fer’s analysis of the early work of Hanne Darboven produced in New York between 1966 and 1968 elaborates upon Alex Alberro’s claim that the work of Conceptual art “takes the form of structure rather than object”. But it does so in quite a different spirit, in order to do justice to the actual appearance of the work and raise further questions about the problem for interpretation introduced by seriality, repetition, and a reflection on archaic systems of information. In 'Hanne Darboven: Seriality and the Time of Solitude', Fer notes that her interest in Darboven – essentially a producer of a species of “outsider” art – was prompted by the products of such a thoroughgoing “negation of the visual” as conceived within Modernism. Because of this, Fer is keen to explore the way in which the visual effects of Darboven’s work remains a problem for both the “Modernist model of surface against which this work deliberately set itself” and “later protocols for thinking about Conceptual art, with the emphasis that has tended to be laid on its rigors and critical relentlessness”.^[27]

For Fer, the compelling feature of Darboven’s work is the central presence of repetition and seriality. Again, we see how Conceptual art responded to and reshaped some of the principal concerns associated with the practices of Minimalism and used them to produce markedly different effects. Fer appreciates this dynamic historical relationship and is therefore less interested in interpretations that index Darboven’s work to the serial production of the commodity and its link in art to the ready-made. Rather, Fer is more concerned with “what gets made out of the work of cancellation that seriality, in Darboven’s work in particular, so effectively stage”. Fer argues that “While serial repetition has tended to be thought of in terms of an impersonal, even objective form of arrangement, the concern is with subjectivity and what kind of subjectivity might be at stake in Darboven’s seriality”. Fer’s project, then, is to provide an account of some types of Conceptual art in terms of a “psychic and social subject”. She does this through a contextualization of Darboven’s work in terms of the practices of LeWitt, Mel Bochner, Carl Andre and Dan Flavin. Her text also tackles the “more heterogeneous, or strange, or unorthodox aspects of Conceptualism to which the work of Darboven testifies”. Interestingly, Darboven’s reliance on systems is refracted through the work of Johan Jacob Moser, an obscure Southern German jurist and writer who proposed an early filing system of cataloguing references. Darboven writes that a system was necessary to enable her to “find something of interest, which lends itself to continuation”.^[28] And while the “serial procedure works by addition or reduction, placing elements in succession according to a system that may or may not be extended ad infinitum”, Darboven’s arrays “have the effect of squeezing out space and so make temporality do the work”. It is duration – “the kind of time that just goes on” – that “threatens the instantaneity of aesthetic experience that had been promoted as the moment of Modernist conviction”.^[29]

In his essay 'Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art', Edward Shanken suggests that the historical divergence, if not antagonism, between Conceptual art and technologically-based art represents a serious misunderstanding on the part of artists and critics which resulted in a missed opportunity for fruitful artistic collaboration. Shanken seeks to “re-examine the relationship between technology and Conceptual Art and to challenge the disciplinary boundaries that obscure significant parallels between Conceptual Art and Art and Technology”.

In this regard, Shanken’s example of the seminal work of Roy Ascott is perspicacious. As Shanken notes, “Art and Technology was perceived by many artists, critics, and historians, as weighted down by, in LeWitt’s words, the 'physicality of the materials' which dominated the 'idea of the work'”.^[30] Citing Ursula Meyer’s remark that “Conceptual Art is diametrically opposed to hardware art”,^[31] Shanken examines the substance of the criticism by Conceptual artists directed at “art and technology”. Terry Atkinson’s writings on the work of David Bainbridge and Harold Hurrell, for instance, reveal some of the real social and cultural differences that prevented a full-blown exchange of knowledge between these two fields. Despite a common interest in the concepts of feedback and control – discourses which were central to the new image of technology – Bainbridge asserted the “importance of the unimportance” of the work as bits of engineering. Atkinson argues that Bainbridge and Hurrell’s approach to art and technology is one where art produces engineering, rather than the reverse, and is dedicated to producing works that cannot be slotted unproblematically into the visual art tradition.^[32] In works such as Hurrell’s Fluidic Device (1967) or in essayistic speculations like Bainbridge’s M1 (1969), technology and its “referential discourse” – cybernetics and so forth – serves as “analogical source material”. The point being that “one respects one’s analogues and their inherent limitations but one is not offering the source’s attributes per se to be marvelled at”.^[33]

While Conceptual artists and “art and technology” artists might have imagined that they existed in two different worlds, Shanken’s research reveals that the referential discourses of indexing, information storage and retrieval – so crucial to Art & Language’s projects of the first-half of the 1970s – were first presented publicly by Jack Burnham in the context of his 1970 survey of art and information, Software (1970, The Jewish Museum, New York). Burnham – whose critical writings on art of the 1960s and early-1970s did much to promote Conceptual art, Earthworks and art and technology as well as advance a political reading of those practices in terms of the late theories of Herbert Marcuse^[34] – is a central figure in Shanken’s account. Burnham’s writing, especially texts published in Artforum during the late 1960s and early 1970s, found a sympathetic audience among many artists and art students. His influence peaked with the publication in 1970 of The Structure of Art, in which the structuralist theory of Claude Lévi-Strauss was applied to a canonical selection of twentieth century avant-garde works of art. Critic and art historian Johanna Drucker further explores the convergence of information theory, communication theory, and Conceptual art in 'The Crux of Conceptualism: Conceptual art, the Idea of Idea, and the Information Paradigm'. By information paradigm, Drucker means “the theorization of information both as a quantifiable discipline and an idea that has relevance across a broad spectrum of economic and cultural activities”.^[36] In her view, the exhibitions Information (1970, The Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Software were not simply efficient vehicles for the institutional and uncontroversial introduction to a general public of Conceptual art. They were exhibitions that could be understood as describing and underscoring the ideological ground that is shared between a new mode of artmaking and the emergent sciences of data processing and systems control.^[37]

Drucker contends that the elimination of the “indexical connection between idea and execution” characteristic of Conceptual art was a defensive reaction motivated, in part, by the recognition that the cultural space of high art was shrinking. The priority of “conceptual values” which Conceptual art attributes to its work enables it to retain its cognitive status as high art, yet “marks the end of Modernism as a mode of aesthetic production”. Thus, “Conceptual art may be said to have invented a response to the cultural forces that might have otherwise obliterated fine art practice”. Responses of this order include Kosuth’s formulation “art as idea as idea”, which Drucker then compares with the practices of Lawrence Weiner, Mel Bochner and John Baldessari. While the latter three are among those artists who contributed to an “examination of the relationship that might be theorized as obtaining between idea and language”, they did so principally in terms of visual art. Drucker summarizes this distinction as the difference between thinking art, reading art, and picturing art. In the case of Bochner, a work such as Language is Not Transparent (1970) is said to point “to the meaning of the phrase as it is constituted by the visual, tactile and perceptible qualities of paint”. Likewise, for Weiner, statements, which appear as Franklin Gothic letters on a wall, function as texts to be read rather than a script to be performed. In Weiner’s work the idea and its instantiation come very close to each other as linguistic entities; although it could be argued that the ‘idea’ of Weiner’s ‘row of many brightly coloured objects’ can be understood either as a literary representation or as a bit of language that stands in an ostensive relation to a real object.

Speaking of Baldessari’s Kissing Series, Drucker claims that “the play with visual conventions that makes the point of the works is a demonstration of the assertion that an image contains cognitive meaning that is outside linguistic parameters”. According to Drucker, these examples serve to problematize LeWitt’s suggestive claim that “an idea is a machine that makes the art” because as soon as “the form makes the idea into something specific, a work, an image, a material locus” a contradiction is set in motion that announces that “the work is and is not the idea”. A contradiction is also sustained by the relationship “between ideational premise and program or algorithm within the context of an information technology”. The fundamental question posed within some practices of Conceptual art – “Does an idea need a body”? – can be applied, Drucker claims, “to information and to the curious condition of data in code storage”. There, information in the context of computer environments has been conceived of as something located between spirit and matter; unlike its counterpart in physics which is mathematically describable in terms of thermodynamics, this definition posits something that exists in a curiously suspended state.

Drucker maps this condition onto the notion of “idea” as it has been articulated in the early practices of Conceptual art. This notion is “neither the pure, transcendent one of Platonic idealism, nor an immaterial abstraction”. What is at issue here is not only the adequacy of the metaphor “information” as a description of the entire field of Conceptual art, but the desire to take “seriously the notion of idea as a visual mode” in order to “establish a way of thinking a relationship between the linguistic and the visual that goes beyond the linguistic turn without obliterating language altogether from cultural view”.

 
One of the lessons to be drawn from a study of the art of the 1960s and 1970s is that when systems analysis, information theory and the like are utilized as resources for making art, it is generally done so in the spirit of a productive misreading. Similarly, such intellectual resources cannot be applied unproblematically to the practice of art for gaining a deeper understanding. In one instance at least, the contemporary application of systems theory to art yields a dramatically different conclusion about the relationship of art to a wider social world. I am referring to the work of Niklas Luhmann, who described the domain of art as an operationally closed and self-referential communicative system.^[38] According to Luhmann, art’s purpose, like that of other social-symbolic systems, is communication. However, where Luhmann and the 1960s enthusiasts for systems theory in art part company is in their respective understanding of the nature of communication in and through art. The artists and critics of the 1960s and 1970s used systems theory pragmatically to facilitate the integration of art and the world. In so doing, they risked the disintegration of art. Luhmann uses systems theory analytically to stress the difference between art and the world. It is a move that risks being mistaken for an attempt to rehabilitate the Modernist practice of resistance through negation.

•FOOTNOTES

^[1]    The genetic relationship of Conceptual art to the administrative processes that drive post-industrial capitalism is a matter of some debate. The point I wish to stress here is that mannered administrative processes — in Conceptual art practice this includes, among other activities, form-filling, compilation of detailed inventories, objectification of social and biological processes and the repetition of fixed routines — are no longer administrative processes as such. This is the point that Benjamin Buchloh fails to appreciate when he condemns some Conceptual art as complicit with the bureaucratized worldview of late-capitalism.

^[2]    Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, Michael Joseph Ltd., London, 1994, p 264.

^[3]    Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958-c.1974, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998, p 248.

^[4]    Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, pp 265-66, 267.

^[5]    Norbert Weiner, The Human Uses of Human Beings, Avon Books, New York, 1954, p 38.

^[6]    Lawrence Alloway, “Network: The Art World Described as a System”, Artforum XI, 1 September 1972, p 29.

[7]    Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2000, p 124.

^[8]    Ibid., pp 124-125.

^[9]    Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, Verso Press, London, 1985, p 56.

^[10]    David Mellor, The Sixties Art Scene in London, exh cat. Barbican Art Gallery, 11 March -
13 June 1993, Phaidon Press, London,1993, p 107.

^[11]    Ibid., p 112.

^[12]    Robert C. Hobbs, 'Affluence, Taste, and the Brokering of Knowledge: Notes on the Social Context of Early Conceptual Art', in Michael Corris, ed., Conceptual Art:  Theory, Myth, and Practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp 200-223.

^[13]    Stephen Willats, 'Statement', 1967, reprinted in Clive Phillpot and Andrea Tarsia, Live in Your Head: Concept and Experiment in Britain 1965-75, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2000, p 161.

^[14]    Stephen Willats, 'Behavioural Nets and Life Structures', The Paper, no. 1, 1971.

^[15]    Michael Corris, 'From Black Holes to Boardrooms: John Latham, Barbara Steveni and the Order of Undivided Wholeness', Art+Text 49, September 1994.

^[16]    Martin Kunz, 'Interview with Vito Acconci About the Development of his Work Since 1966', in Marianne Eigenheer, ed., Vito Acconci, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Luzern, 7 May - 11 June 1978, unpaginated.

^[17]    Mellor, The Sixties Art Scene in London, p 110.

^[18]    Robert Morris, 'Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making', Artforum VIII, 8, April 1970.

^[19]    Jack Burnham, 'Hans Haacke’s Cancelled Show at the Guggenheim', Artforum IX, 10 June 1971.

^[20]    Ibid.

^[21]    Ibid.

^[22]    Fredric Jameson, “Hans Haacke and the Cultural Logic of Postmodernism”, in Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1986, pp 42-43. Jameson notes that “such a strategy — even conceived provisionally — has little of the vigorous self-confidence and affirmation of older political and even proto-political aesthetics, which aimed at opening and developing some radically new and distinct revolutionary cultural space within the fallen space of capitalism. Yet as  modest and as frustrating as it may sometimes seem, a homeopathic cultural politics seems to be all we can currently think or imagine”. p 43.

^[23]    Hans Haacke to Jack Burnham, correspondence, 10 April 1968.

^[24]    Ibid.

^[25]    James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2001, p 267.

^[26]    Hobbs, 'Affluence, Taste, and the Brokering of Knowledge', p 200.

^[27]    Briony Fer, 'Hanne Darboven: Seriality and the Time of Solitude', in Michael Corris, ed., Conceptual Art:  Theory, Myth, and Practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, p 223.

^[28]    Hanne Darboven, 'Artists on their Art', Art International vol. 12, April 1968.

^[29]    Fer, 'Hanne Darboven', p 230.

^[30]    Edward Shanken, 'Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art', in Michael Corris, ed., Conceptual Art:  Theory, Myth, and Practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, p 245.

^[31]    Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art, Dutton Press, New York, 1972, pp xvi.

^[32]    Terry Atkinson, 'Concerning Interpretation of the Bainbridge/Hurrell Models', Art-Language vol 1, no. 2 , February 1970, p 68.

^[33]    Harold Hurrel, 'Notes on Atkinson’s 'Concerning Interpretation of the Bainbridge/Hurrell Models'', Art-Language vol 1, no. 2, February 1970, p 73.

^[34]    Burnham writes that “one common assumption holds that ‘humanist’ values — sensitivity, self-expression, meaningfulness — have been banished from art. It would be more accurate to say that they have been lifted from the context of important idealism and directed towards the shaping of reality per se. Marcuse phrases it best, ‘. . . the realization of art as principle of social reconstruction presupposes fundamental social change. At stake is not the beautification of that which is, but the total reorientation of life in a new society”. See Jack Burnham, Art in the Marcusean Analysis, No. 6 Penn State Papers in Art Education, Paul Edmonston, ed.,  Pennsylvania State University, Philadelphia, 1969, p 21.

^[36]    Johanna Drucker, 'The Crux of Conceptualism', in Michael Corris, ed., Conceptual Art:  Theory, Myth, and Practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, p 251.

^[37]    Ibid., p 251.

^[38]    Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2000. I am indebted to Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden for bringing this reference to my attention. On the relationship between Art & Language and Luhmann's systems theory, see Art & Language, 'Roma reason: Luhmann's Art as a Social System', Radical Philosophy, 2002, pp 14-21, and the collected papers of the symposium co-hosted by Institut für soziale Gegenwartsfragen, Freiburg and Kunstraum Wien: Art & Language & Luhmann, Passagen Verlag, Vienna, 1997.