Matthew Newton's Electronic Notebook: September 2009

"Notes on Conceptualisms" by Vaness Place and Robert Fitterman

Ugly Duckling Press, 2009

Place and Fitterman seem to set out to identify conditions and potential problems in conceptual writing. Written from a writer's perspective, I continually attempted to translate their ideas to visual art practice. Though, Place and Fitterman seem up on the dynamics of where the walls are between those practices, how tall they are, the directions they're moving, and where some of the secret doors may be. Here is a collection of quotes that got my attention, listed by page:

18. Note that in post-conceptual work... interactivity has been proved as potentially banal as a Disney cruise, active as a Pavlovian dinner bell.

19. Note Lacan's The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: the self is an Imaginary construct, made of parts of one like an other so to be recognized as one by an other, thus made contingent. Mimicry/mimesis being the means by which the subject makes the imagined self. Contingency/multiplicity is therefore the one true nature of universality.

20. Critique is inseparable from the replication of the error under critique. Replication is a sign of desire.

24. One might argue that devaluation is now a traditional/canonical aim of contemporary art. Thus there is now great value in devaluation.

27. Note that the absence of mastery is old hat for females and other others. Christine Buci-Glucksmann: "this discourse through the other is also discourse of the Other."

28. Note that woman has been the likeness of a likeness. Note the fidelity problem, or the failure of fidelity.

28. Radical mimesis is radical artifice: there is nothing so artificial as an absolutely faithful realism.

40. Rewriting (appropriating) obliterates the past in favor of history as appropriation rewrites the present in favor of the future.

56. A crisis in interiority is a crisis of perspective. In jettisoning the normative (or the normative of the normative), we are left with the contingent or relative normative, which is no real normative at all, and worse still, recapitulates the same problems (by default and paying attention to something else) as the old normative normative.

63. Visual art wants stories. History stories, narrative stories, stories about the self and what used to be called the other. At this point in time, when conceptual and post-conceptual visual art has abnegated showing in favor of telling, and telling in favor of saying, writers think of rushing in with little rollers, hoping to get some horizontal traction from visual aids, to add to a stock-in-trade that which we fear most subtracts. For isn't this the point of this? We're scared some other team's winning, or won, and so concede the power of the optic over the litteral, and want to figure out how to candy the eye. Some of our most innovative conceptual writing prints blank pages, suitable for framing, or collages Google bricolages, or catalogues cutups, nothing worth writing home about, but plenty to see. Dematerialization, that's the ticket, constructivism, that's the other. No new news is good news. And before the beat cop shows up to move the crowd along, we should consider that from Newman's nugatory zip to Gerhard Richter's squeegeed woods to last season's gallery show of airbrushed portraits of the cast of Hogan's Heores, visual images are being systemically drained of image, leaving behind the image referent--language.