Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn 9780226007915

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Systems We Have Loved

Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn. Eve Meltzer

the university of chicago press ✺ chicago and london

eve meltzer is assistant professor of visual studies at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2013 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2013. Printed in China 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13   1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-00788-5 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-00791-5 (e-book) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Meltzer, Eve, author. Systems we have loved: conceptual art, affect, and the antihumanist turn / Eve Meltzer. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-226-00788-5 (cloth: alkaline paper) — isbn 978-0-226-00791-5 (e-book)  1.  Conceptual art. 2. Structuralism. I. Title. n6494.c63m45 2013 709.04'075—dc23 2012025206

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∞ This paper meets the requirements of ansi /  n iso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Antepartum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 The Dream of the Information World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 2 Turning Around, Turning Away . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 3 The Expanded Field and Other, More Fragile States of Mind . . . . 117 4 After Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229

Acknowledgments

I wrote this book over many years, in many places, and with many forms of support. Each has mattered to its making in distinct and special ways. Systems We Have Loved first took shape at the University of California, Berkeley, at a time when that institution was — at least for those of us there — the center of the intellectual universe. It was Kaja Silverman who first and in the most profound way made that universe matter to me. Through her close readings of Freud and Lacan, and her own writing, Kaja explained the ways in which feeling and theory become intertwined. Anne Wagner made the 1960s and ’70s meaningful to me in ways nuanced and vivid, material and political; she has become a model for what art history can be. I am fortunate to have received the generous and incisive feedback of the brilliant Tim Clark. Likewise, Shannon Jackson provided great support as a reader of this text in its early days. Many others at Berkeley contributed to this book. I thank Judith Butler for demonstrating, through her leadership of the Department of Rhetoric, that going out on a limb is the interesting place to be. Fred Dolan and Margaretta Lovell also helped to shape my direction in these pages. I am deeply appreciative for my dear friends Elise Archias, Huey Copeland, and Bibiana Obler; each read drafts of this book at various stages and provided

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the right measure of criticism and enthusiasm to keep the project evolving. To Huey, especially, I owe more phone hours than can ever be repaid. At a critical juncture, Andrew Moisey offered to read the entire manuscript and subsequently pushed me to call it “finished.” Many others from Berkeley and beyond deserve special mention for their intellectual camaraderie and invaluable support: Nina Dubin, Matthew Jesse Jackson, John Muse, Julian Myers, Zabet Patterson, Darien Shanske, Michael Suarez, Domietta Torlasco, Andrew Uroskie, Peter Wegner, and Lynne Zeavin. Three years as a Stanford Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow gave me the invaluable rewards of time, the understanding that comes with it, and an interdisciplinary community of fellows from whom I learned so much. I want to thank Seth Lerer for bringing me to Stanford University and orchestrating such a productive program. My fellow Mellon fellows — especially Lisa Cooper and Graham Larkin — were fantastic interlocutors. Thanks go, too, to the Department of Art and Art History there, especially Bryan Wolf, Pamela Lee, and Jody Maxmin, for giving me a discipline to call my own and terrific students to work with. Peggy Phelan further enriched those days in the Palo Alto sun by including me in her Mellon Foundation Workshop, “The Politics of Action: Art and the Public Sphere.” I am fortunate to be part of New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study — a remarkably intellectually capacious place. My wonderfully convivial colleagues and my students must know that they have also helped me to refine the ideas presented here. To Pepe Karmel of the Department of Art History — I owe many thanks for creating opportunities for me to share my work and for maintaining my art historical imprimatur at NYU. For supporting me through all of the turns I chose to make over these years, special thanks go to Stephen Duncombe, Lisa Goldfarb, Karen Hornick, Brad Lewis, Kim Phillips-Fein, Stacy Pies, George Shulman, and the fabulous Susanne Wofford. Beyond these institutions, I have been lucky to have had the example and support of many scholars in the fields of contemporary art history and visual studies. Richard Meyer and Miwon Kwon have long been wonderful models. Carrie Noland took enthusiastic interest in my work at an early moment by inviting me to share it at the 2002 UCI Humanities Research Institute, “Gesture as Inscription: Movement, Art, Writing.” Jessica Wyman pursued my work on Robert Morris for publication; Sypros Papapetros did the same with respect to my thinking on Rosalind Krauss’s Expanded Field

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paradigm. For inviting me to serve as faculty at the 2010 Stone Summer Theory Institute, “Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic,” I owe a great debt of gratitude to James Elkins, the other faculty he convened there — Jay Bernstein, Darmuid Costello, and Hal Foster — and the students who participated, all of whom helped me test some of the newly reconceived aspects of my polemic, particularly those involving affect theory. The arguments contained in this book have been presented at many other seminars, symposia, and conferences unnamed here — for each occasion and its participants, I am thankful. Funding for the research, writing, and production of this book was generously provided by several sources: the Department of Rhetoric and the Graduate Division at UC Berkeley; the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program; the American Council of Learned Societies; the UC Berkeley Townsend Center for the Humanities; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. For making it possible that the artworks I discuss appear in these pages as beautifully as they do, I thank NYU’s Humanities Initiative for a Grant-in-Aid as well as Dean Susanne Wofford, who generously awarded me a grant from the Dean’s Discretionary Fund. This book was crafted around the indispensable resources of several archives, collections, and individuals. I am grateful to all, in particular: the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, particularly Judy Throm; the Leo Castelli Gallery; Sarah Kovach at Dia Art Foundation; the Hayward Gallery, London; Nancy Holt; the Museum of Modern Art Archive, New York; David Platzker at Specific Object; the Tate Gallery Store, London, especially John Bracken; Julia Jachs at the Generali Foundation; Xan Price at the Sonnabend Gallery. Early on, Susan Jenkins shared with me her findings on the Information show. Robert Morris made nearly a hundred of his Blind Time drawings available to me and also responded to my questions. Mary Kelly’s generosity has exceeded my capacity to make use of it. It is her work that frames this book and fuels much of what I have to say in these pages. The book is, quite simply, unimaginable without her and her work. For making the process of publication a supportive, patient, and most pleasurable one, I am grateful to the University of Chicago Press. I thank most especially my editor, Susan Bielstein, and her assistant, Anthony Burton, as well as Erin DeWitt for her careful copyediting. I am profoundly

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grateful to both of my readers, especially Jennifer L. Roberts, whose feedback provided me with the most astute and transformative criticism that this book has endured. Matthew Morrocco’s terrific work with images enhances the book throughout. Without the tireless precision and dedication of McCallan Stringer, my research assistant, I simply do not know how I would have gotten the job done. To my parents, Beth and David Meltzer; Julia and Joe, my sister and brother; Alan Sieroty, my uncle; and our growing family — thank you for filling my world with good humor and understanding, great food, and stunning photographs. I would not be able to write, much less think so long and hard about such a thing as affective experience, were it not for the nearly two decades I have spent as friend and partner to Joseph Thometz. He has accompanied me through a lifetime of talk of “conceptualism” and “structuralism,” all the while safeguarding that there would always be room for more, most especially our two children — Sammy and Thea Mia — who daily show me what a more extended, indeed, expansive subjectivity feels like. To the three of you, and to the “us” that you have made for me — I dedicate this book. ✺

Antepartum

Conceptual art is a bunk. . . . It’s a felt, it’s feeling, it’s felt. I feel it. It’s all bullshit what you are talking about. Bullshit. . . . Did you ever take acid? . . . I am a human being. . . . I just swing with all these human responses. I meet people. I meet a ditch digger and I say, “How are you doing today?” And they say, “Look at the sky.” And I look at the sky and I say, “Beautiful, man.” And what do you say? You say, “Make a system out of it.” — Robert Smithson, playing a West Coast artist, in East Coast / West Coast (1969) The tendency of modern inquiry is more and more towards the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is everywhere.  — E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871), cited epigraphically in Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969)

Antepartum — the silent, ninety-second, Super 8 film-loop installation produced by Mary Kelly in 1973 — begins in darkness.1 Like the moon, the body on the screen comes into visibility only because of the light (fig. 0.1). This orb moves quickly through its phases: first crescent, then quartered, and finally settling, waxing gibbous. What comes into view is the swollen, pregnant abdomen of a nude woman, her body made whole to us once we recognize the masses of flesh above as the undersides of her breasts, and then follow the dark line below as it bisects the abdomen and drops from navel to pubis. What this more oriented vantage reveals is that we are in fact looking up through the eye of the camera from below, watching this body’s movements as they are tracked as much by the frame of the filmic shot as by the light into which, and then away from which, the belly moves with each breath that the woman takes. Antepartum is less well-known and remarked upon than its sequel, Kelly’s expansive, multi-part Post-Partum Document (1973 – 79), wherein the artist purports to record the first years of the life of her son as he makes his gradual entry into language and the symbolic order — his “cultural kidnapping,” as Lucy Lippard once wrote (fig. 0.2).2 This is a useful fact to know, not least because it mirrors, on the one hand, the sheer excess of the later

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0.1  Mary Kelly, Antepartum, 1973. Still photograph, black-and-white 8mm film loop transferred to DVD (edition of 5), 1:30 min. Generali Foundation, Vienna; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Stanford University. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the artist.

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work, the way in which the Document inundates the viewer with a glut of difficult-to-decipher information, diagrams, schemas, theoretical paradigms, and so on — all of which reflect the aesthetic and theoretical idioms of Kelly’s day; and, on the other hand, the sparseness or minimalism of the earlier work: the brute, frontal facticity of its filmic presence. Here is a body, the body of the artist. To be sure, it is presence that Antepartum seems to want to convey if not anticipate, not just by the visual force of the fecund shape that subtly, gently rises and swells over and again on the screen as it breathes — indeed, lives — but also by the patient and watchful attention of the camera’s gaze that makes this body never disappear from view. By the simple logic of an infinite loop, presence is secured. Another difference, then, obtains: Post-Partum Document, as we shall later see, appears resolutely progressive in its development from the child’s first fecal traces

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to his inscription of his own name, at which point it could be said — as the structuralist psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has — that the child has “faded” or disappeared, having given up being and presence as the cost of his entry into the cultural order.3 Antepartum, on the other hand, is recursive, suspended — although not quite waiting for the subject to appear as one would say of other important works of the period. Take Frantz Fanon’s 1952 account (published in English in 1967) of his experience in the movie theater: with the phrase “I wait for me,” he anticipates his own abjection on the screen and in the eyes of others, his own coming into appearance as an obdurately racialized subject.4 Or recall Faith Wilding’s 1972 poem “Waiting,” performed as a fifteen-minute monologue at the Womanhouse exhibition in Los Angeles. There she chronicled live all of the ways in which the female subject exists in the pained and eternally deferred activity of waiting. “Waiting for someone to hold me. . . . Waiting to grow up. . . . Waiting for him to tell me I’m beautiful. . . . Waiting for my flesh to sag. . . . Waiting for sleep.” Yet Antepartum is not so much in waiting as it is stilled — perhaps stalled even — not unlike many other works from the decade: Vito Acconci’s Centers (1971) and Air Time (1973), Lynda Benglis’s Now (1973), Nancy Holt and Richard Serra’s Boomerang (1974) — to mention but a few.5 There is yet another presence in Antepartum, and it is also moving. There is more than one body in the image we see on the screen. As the filmic frame tracks the movement of the artist’s body, that body, in turn, registers the movement of the unborn being within. Sweeping her hands back and forth across her belly, Kelly responds by returning this movement with a tender, searching touch. She repeats the gesture, over and again. Here, then, is the artist. The artist is a woman, and she is both producing and reproducing before our very eyes. The year — to repeat — was 1973. It seems odd, if not anachronistic, to think of Antepartum together with what we already know or at least tend to recall when conjuring this historical moment: the end of over a decade of U.S. combat activity in Southeast Asia; the Watergate scandal; the waning effects of and fallout from the counterculture movements in the United States and the United Kingdom, which had arguably peaked in 1972; the legalization of abortion with the U.S. Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade — just to begin the familiar list. And from the vantage of artistic practice in this country, 1973 is also the year most often cited as the point at which the 1960s as a period of cultural, political, as well as aesthetic transformations and achievements, including the conceptual art move-

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0.2  Mary Kelly and son, photograph of recording session, 1975, included as frontispiece, Post-Partum Document (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Photo: Ray Barrie. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the artist.

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ment, effectively “ended.”6 And what with so much presence, Antepartum also seems a strange, perhaps even retrograde place to begin an account of the antihumanist subject: a disembodied, disaffected subject — or at least, as Fanon and Wilding would have it, only injuriously affected; the subject who is abducted and then “produced” by an ideological world that is always in place and already awaiting — a world that Kelly does not yet seem to recognize with her repetitive maternal caress. I begin this book with Mary Kelly’s Antepartum because it wants both to announce and to address the imminent birth of a subject, if not the subject — to make it its subject matter. So, too, is my aim with this book: to reconsider the dominant late twentieth-century view of the human subject as that figure was foretold, secured, and contested in major works of art, philosophy, and literary criticism of the time. To this end, the book focuses on two of the most transformative movements of the twentieth century, both of which, I argue, have wrestled with this subject: conceptualism and structuralism. With the term “conceptualism,” I mean to invoke those aesthetic strategies that emerged in the late 1960s, are said to have peaked by 1973, and were associated with the radical “dematerialization” of the art object. To be sure, these moves were also prompted by the social and political atmosphere surrounding the Vietnam War as well as the critique of commodity culture, institutions, and heavily “administrated” experience — as many have recounted carefully before me.7 Such strategies were varied in appearance. Sometimes artists (say, for example, Adrian Piper, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, Dan Graham, and Mel Bochner, among so many others) chose language as their medium — if not words themselves, then forms that appeared to be like a language (e.g., grids, signs, text), which by 1970 came to fall under the sign of “information.” Because their rhetorics resisted the conventional ideology of visibility, conceptualist strategies are often considered resolutely anti-visual. Historically, this perception has affected our readiness to see these strategies as nonetheless taking shape within the visual field, and to read them in light of the formal structure of their visual ambivalence. In many of its iterations, conceptual aesthetics also concerned the nature of art itself and thus has long been associated with a marked form of self-reflectivity and self-criticality that is continuous with the modernist tradition but — as I argue in the pages that follow — importantly distinctive in its affective charge.

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My reader will soon notice that my treatment of so-called conceptual art is different than that usually offered by art historians. In fact, many readers will not recognize some of the work under study as “conceptualist.” Others may wonder why I have framed such a study between years that could be said to pre- and post-date conceptualism, even if I would concur with the art historical common sense that has fixed conceptualism’s emergence as an identifiable movement and a discursive formation to the year 1966.8 Rather than come at my subject by way of artists and artworks routinely classified as “conceptual,” I have instead foregrounded in order to examine and trace historically a range of aesthetic strategies and figures that are most often associated with conceptualism. These include systems and structures, language and “information,” and the scientistic and seemingly disaffected mode of rendering the visual field and, more generally, of managing experience. Indeed, these are the aspects by which we have come to recognize what we most commonly call “conceptualism.” Some of the work examined here is decidedly conceptualist (e.g., much of the Information show [1970], the subject of chapter 1, and Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document [1973 – 79], the focus of chapter 4); still other artworks under study could be said to anticipate conceptualism (e.g., Robert Morris’s proto-conceptualism of the early 1960s, considered in chapter 2), come “after” it (e.g., Morris’s first and second series of Blind Time drawings [1973 and 1976], also in chapter 2), or wryly resist its ways (e.g., Robert Smithson’s intervention of the late 1960s and early 1970s, examined in chapter 3). In chapter 3, my treatment of Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” considers the art historian’s structuralist turn, signaled by that 1979 essay, as conceptualist in its rhetoric. In effect, my case studies could be said to approach conceptualism from all sides: in anticipation of it and in its aftermath; as we have been captivated by its rhetorics as well as defended against them. Taken together, the art and art historical work under study here reveal that these strategies and figures have had both aesthetic and theoretical lives, that these lives were quite active in the United States by the late 1960s, and that the terms “conceptualism” and “structuralism” best describe these lives — even if one might also see my subjects in the light of other terms like “minimalism,” “neo-Dadaism,” “poststructuralism,” even “postmodernism.” In sum, each time I deploy the term “conceptualism” or “conceptual” in this book, I mean to signal these nuances ultimately in an effort to recalibrate the intellectual-historical optic under which we interpret the meaning of these far-reaching aesthetic forms — even further

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reaching, that is, than our ordinary understanding of “conceptual art” has allowed us to see. It has been over twenty years since Benjamin Buchloh described conceptual art as “an art practice emphasizing its parallels, if not identity, with the systems of linguistic signs,” and linked its practice with what he called “the aesthetic of administration” and “the critique of institutions.”9 Likewise, at least since 1966, the artistic practice of institutional critique and the scholarship that grew up alongside it have insisted upon a belief in and suspicion about the systematic control and oppression that institutional structures — being, as they are, “like a language” — consistently perform.10 But the fact that not just conceptualism but also structuralism came hitched to these terms — “ language” and “systems”— has remained an inadequately examined fact. For, just like conceptual artists, structuralist theorists — Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the most memorable names among them — looked to systems and language for a revolution in signifying structures. Maintaining that human endeavors were inescapably governed by the structural order of the grid (a motif also repeatedly put to work by conceptual artists), structuralists argued that all social and cultural phenomena could be mastered through a “science” of the signifier. And it was by way of this claim that structuralism marked, once and for all, the end of the humanist understanding of the subject as in command of not only himself and a consciousness fully transparent to itself, but also the historical process. Perhaps most importantly, structuralism produced and made urgent the problem of the belatedness of subjectivity: the notion that the human subject is a mere effect of preexisting systems. Indeed, the most lasting of structuralist claims is that the condition of being-after determines the subject in both a liberatory and a plaguing way, for belatedness is always built into structuralist totality at the moment of its articulation. While the semiological fantasy that drives our technological imaginary is a well-excavated subject of study for art historians, the interface of the structuralist imaginary with the practice of conceptual art has been rendered a historical coincidence of minimal import, rather than as a complex relation that merits thorough consideration. Take, for instance, Michael Corris’s useful volume Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice: in its third section, Corris defines some heavily determined terms from the period, such as “information”; but there he also limits the scope to include systems and other theory that “helped to drive and justify the technologi-

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cal revolution of the 1960s.”11 Moreover, if we are to recover “the historical detail necessary to an adequate redescription of Conceptual art in terms of social discourse,” as Corris claims for his volume, then structuralism must figure prominently.12 But while the scholarly literature on structuralism as well as that on conceptualism are vast and rich, the two movements have not been considered, in a sustained way at least, in relationship to one another.13 After all, Buchloh’s reference to the “systems of linguistic signs,” with which, he claims, art practice was so identified, is but the tip of an enormous structuralist iceberg. What’s more: it is not just that structuralism helps to elaborate conceptualism’s claims and aesthetic strategies, but also that conceptual art gives us insight into structuralism by raising questions not otherwise available to the humanities. With this book, then, I hope to reorient the sights as well as raise the stakes of the art historical questions that have defined the field. Thankfully, my post-dissertating years afforded me the insight that no one needs another book about language in art. While that line of inquiry has generated a voluminous scholarship that both pre- and post-dates the period in question, it seems to have suggested, above all, that the appearance of language in the visual arts does not itself suffice as an organizing principle for rigorous inquiry.14 It simply doesn’t tell us enough about what we need to know — about art or about language. My aim is not to map, merely, conceptual art onto the usual antihumanist worldview, but rather to show that conceptual art reveals in its affective and visual dimensions the slips and chiasms of subjectivity that structuralism can’t account for. And although some of my subjects certainly found themselves reading Althusser, Jameson, or Lacan, for example, my book does not set out to trace — as Howard Singerman so ably has — the concrete art-pedagogical scenes in which structuralism actually entered artists’ real spaces.15 Rather than attempt to trace or “hunt back,” if you will, conceptualism to structuralism (as if theoretical matter takes, or takes place in, some more concrete, actual, or real form), I proceed from the premise that the structural and conceptual figures in question have had a discursive and aesthetic life, and that that double life requires us to think formal and intellectual structures together through a kind of careful conceptual management and measurement of the real and the imaginary. Within the context of my argument, “conceptualism” comes married — although never entirely happily — to “structuralism.” In the 1960s, by which time structuralist claims and polemics had encouraged the ad-

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vent of conceptual art, they also raised intractable problems that conceptual artists were forced to process. And they did so in ways that reflect the vicissitudes of this coupling. I read the work that resulted as comprising a fantasmatic field that reflects not one affect but numerous feelings about the structuralist worldview. The term “fantasmatic” is drawn from the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy: an “imaginary scene in which the subject is a protagonist, representing the fulfilment of a wish (in the last analysis, an unconscious wish) in a manner that is distorted to a greater or lesser extent by defensive processes.”16 Kaja Silverman parses out the elements of this scene when she writes that the term “evokes both what [Christian] Metz would call the ‘imaginariness’ of the . . . object, and the desires which it causes to circulate through” its subjects.17 While Metz’s imaginary object and subject belong to the filmic scene, here ours is constituted at the sites where the very same notions taken up within theoretical discourse (structuralism) are thought and felt through aesthetic form (conceptualism). These feelings, we shall see, were not univocal but, rather, ran the gamut — from Hans Haacke’s confident investment in a picture of the world as a set of totalizing systems, to Robert Smithson’s profound skepticism conveyed through works of art that produce peculiar affective conditions or, as he says, “more fragile states of mind.”18 My aim, however, is not to position structuralism as the monolithic core of a unidimensional conceptualism. Rather, in the pages that follow, I seek to recover structuralism’s central claims and figures for a better understanding of conceptualism’s assorted and remarkably long-lasting artistic strategies and rhetorics. Conversely, my examination of the visual form that artists gave to these figures serves, in turn, to illuminate their life in the theoretical field. Ultimately, by considering structuralism and conceptualism in light of one another, I claim not to have found the latter’s lost referent, but rather to expose a shared investment in antihumanism. That investment often appeared “in the name of ‘science,’ ” as Kate Soper explains, a science by means of which the structuralist movement first launched its attack on humanist “mythology.” Inspired initially by Ferdinand de Saussure’s success in founding a “science” of linguistics based on exclusive study of the governing system of language (langue) as opposed to its manifestation in particular languages (langages), the structuralists contrasted the objectivity and scientificity of the study of structures underlying social and cultural phenomena to the subjectivism of a “humanist”

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emphasis on creativity, freedom and purpose. They argued that since conscious experience is itself only explicable in terms of the unconscious and unwilled systems that govern its production, any attempt to account for it at the level of consciousness itself must result in an evolutionary and ethnocentric perspective that is profoundly unscientific. . . .19

By “investment,” I mean to suggest not that artists wholeheartedly accepted these claims to objectivity and scientificity, nor believed fully in the notion that structures of relations constituted human subjectivity or the idea that humans exist primarily as sign users, what Roland Barthes calls “Homo significans.”20 Rather, artists processed these claims in a variety of ways that were captured in the affective dimensions of their work. For example, in Kelly’s Post-Partum Document, the appearance of so many scientistic discourses and diagrammatic aesthetics seems disaffected, dry, and intellectually distant, especially given that the artist’s son is the subject of her work. At the same time, what these affects ultimately reveal is the artist’s profound and rather amorous attachment to those rhetorics themselves. It is as if she were mother (as well as father) of the discourse as well as to her child. That structuralist theorists and conceptual artists shared a stake in antihumanism is significant not just for a new reading of conceptualist aesthetics, but also because many who practice in the humanities have for decades partaken of this investment as well. By this I mean first to recall the obvious fact that structuralist and poststructuralist discourses have provided many disciplines within the academy with a common language at least since the end of the 1960s, by which time, as Elizabeth W. Bruss writes, “the symptoms” of this theoretical imaginary, “heretofore fugitive and for the most part manageable, could no longer be ignored.” The signs were everywhere (as, indeed, everything seemed destined to become yet another sign): Professional meetings that might once have spent their sessions in admiring the visionary system of a Blake or a Yeats turned instead to the great system-building critics and the deconstructive subverters of those systems. . . . All at once the books that were most honored, most frequently cited or condemned, were no longer scholarly monographs on the roots of Restoration comedy or readings of the later Eliot but were instead the collected papers of the latest international symposium (e.g., The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man) — books in which one set of critics offered introductions to another,

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complete with histories and arduous appraisals of the structure of their arguments, their ideological positions, even their characteristic rhetorical modes.21

Bruss refers here to the shift in Anglo-American literary theory in the late 1960s, but the scene she conjures could just as well be said to describe the structuralist turn, which fueled that disciplinary change along with many others. It is in the wake of this turn — I mark it at 1966 for reasons I describe below — that scholars in the humanities have practiced and to a great extent continue to practice, immersed in, absorbed by, and identified with what we might call the spectacle of discourse, even as many have made the case (tired yet, no less, often correct) for the existence of and hoped-for end to a spectacularized society where experience can only be had by proxy. This has come with the more troubling proposition that the visible world — indeed, visibility itself — must be resisted or, worse, doubted away.22 It is also in the wake of this turn that we have come to see “signs everywhere,” and to think meaningfulness as delimited by “signification.” And it is, furthermore, due to the impact of antihumanist thought that we more often than not think of the subject as a mere effect of preexisting systems and conceive of identity categories as based on a structural notion of difference. This last claim is the one that struck the fatal blow at the essentialist model of universal origins. In addition to this investment in antihumanism, the “spectacle of discourse” has also fostered a kind of critical malaise in the field of contemporary art history in particular. By this I mean to refer to the current exhaustion of structuralist / poststructuralist discourse within the field, the vagueness of its key terms and strategies brought about by academic overuse and misapplication, as well as its awkward historical status — the way in which theory can oscillate between serving as a critical tool and as an object of historical study. Indeed, structuralist theory will oscillate here, as well, it being that I am someone who, at once, counts herself as one of structuralism’s subjects and therefore speaks in (or, rather, is spoken by) its terms and, at the same time, seeks to gain a critical, historical distance from them. Thus, with this book I aim to illuminate and disrupt this critical malaise first by historicizing structuralism in the context of art practice in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s, and then by re-parsing the vocabulary, key concepts, and affective modes of the discourse as they formed and transformed as theoretical and aesthetic figures. My focus here is on structuralism and not poststructuralism, although at times I use

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both terms to refer to the earlier movement as well as its afterlife. I have chosen to foreground structuralism because the two movements arguably form part of one and the same “adventure,” to use Étienne Balibar’s word. Structuralism was in fact already poststructuralism, anticipatory of its direction; poststructuralism, in turn, still remains essentially structuralism at work. Balibar even goes so far as to suggest that there may in fact be no such thing as poststructuralism. “All the ‘great’ texts that can be attached to the name of structuralism in fact contain both these movements, even if we must admit differences of accent between the two. The tendency is for structuralists to move from one gesture to the other — one is tempted to say, from a ‘structuralism of structures,’ that is, one that seeks to discover structures and invariants, to a structuralism ‘without structures,’ that is, one that seeks their indeterminacy or immanent negation.”23 In sum, whatever distinctions obtain between these gestures, their impact on my inquiry is minimal. For it is the structuralist “adventure” that we have to thank for bringing together such terms, concepts, and modes as these: “system” and “structure”; “information”; scientistic reasoning and diagrammatic forms; an affection for the disaffected; the condition of belatedness; an extreme skepticism of the visible married with a sense of epistemic mastery over otherwise “invisible” structures — to begin a list that will grow in the pages that follow. Let us turn, then, to two terms at the heart of the matter: “system” and “structure.”

Systems and Structures, 1966 It was 1972, four years after Jack Burnham published “Systems Esthetics,” when the critic and curator Lawrence Alloway wrote, “I want to describe [the art world] as a system and consider what effects it has on art or on our understanding of art.”24 Prompted by numerous indicators coming from exhibition titles, artworks, similar statements made by artists and critics, as well as developments occurring within diverse fields, Alloway writes as though such a description was both in demand and yet would also have to be formulated uniquely for the art world. “Network: The Art World Described as a System,” published in the September issue of Artforum, departs from the recognition that since World War II the distribution, circulation, and consumption of the work of art had become part of a “communications network of great efficiency” and “new and unsettling

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connectivity,” wherein participants play multiple roles at once (e.g., as collectors, donors, critics, curators, artists, trustees), for the art “system” is but a decentralized network of shifting, mobile positions, not unlike the field of signifiers described by so many literary critics of the time.25 Alloway’s description of the art world stitches together a variety of nuances drawn freely from a range of sources. Citing texts from the fields of systems theory, organization theory, and social theory, as well as names from a list that includes Roland Barthes, Henri Lefebvre, and Ferdinand de Saussure, Alloway does not synthesize these senses or even prioritize one over another. Rather, he picks and chooses amongst them as he works to get right his sense of the systematicity of the art world. “Beware of the word ‘system’ and its associated jargon,” Anthony Wilden would write the very same year in the introduction to System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange.26 Like Alloway, Wilden had in mind the vast array of discourses to which the word mattered. More recently, in her book Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s, Pamela Lee mines some of the senses to which Wilden refers, ranging from the political to the ecological.27 Of particular focus in Lee’s polemic, which is more generally concerned with the subject of (and anxiety about) time in the art of the 1960s, are the ways in which systems are described within cybernetics, systems theory, and game and information theories. As Lee duly notes, the discourses she privileges in her account and assigns as points of reference for voices such as Alloway’s and Burnham’s “intended to humanize the sciences” by softening the hardness of scientific discourses in order to make them applicable to a vast number of phenomena such as religion, psychology, and art.28 However, to think of the place and role of “systems” in the 1960s and ’70s in this way is to overlook the structuralist inflection of the word and the very different aim that the structuralist adventure set out to accomplish: to make a science of the humanities, that is, to make a “human sciences” — or, as suggested by the title of the 1966 international symposium convened under the auspices of the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center, “the sciences of man.” According to this science, all discourses — anthropology, history, classical studies, comparative literature, comparative religions, linguistics, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, semiology, and sociology — could be unified by taking the simplest and the strongest one, structuralist linguistics, as its model. In fact, a quick survey of the proceedings of the 1966 conference suggests that what mattered

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more than any particular overriding discipline was the notion of a signifying system with which the human subject could be examined scientifically — t hat is to say, “ ‘calculated,’ . . . [or] analyzed without its humanistic or metaphysical overtones.”29 So it was 1966 when — just as so many artists and critics were struggling to think of art and its world as systems of varied sorts, to question the nature of systematicity in the world, and to interrogate with artistic form the habits, limits, and possibilities of systems — over one hundred humanists and social scientists from the United States and eight other countries convened in Baltimore to inaugurate a two-year program of seminars and colloquia to explain and, in some cases, contest structuralism before an American audience for the very first time. The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man included presentations by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, René Girard, Jean Hyppolite, Jacques Lacan, Guy Rosolato, and Tzvetan Todorov, among others, and represented the full range of disciplines.30 Back in France, 1966 also marked the year when Lacan’s Écrits (later translated into English in 1977) and Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (translated into English in 1970 as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences) were published and became theoretical best-sellers. A. J. Greimas published Structural Semantics that year. This of course followed upon the success of Claude LéviStrauss beginning in the late 1940s, whose first important object of study, the incest taboo, drew upon what he had learned from Marx and Freud, as well as Comte, Durkheim, and Mauss, but importantly also imported the linguistic model into anthropology. The Elementary Structures of Kinship, defended as his thesis in 1948, argued that kinship is a closed system within which subjects exist merely as positions: mother, father, daughter, and so on.31 The year 1966 would also not have been what it was without the work of Roland Barthes, who became a mythic figure for structuralism following the publication of Writing Degree Zero in 1953, and continued as such for well over a decade. “Adding the adjective ‘structuralist’ was a good sales pitch in the mid-sixties,” recalls Jean Pouillon in conversation with the intellectual historian Françoise Dosse. “Everyone was affected, including the ‘trainer of the French soccer team, who declared that he was going to reorganize the team according to structuralist principles.’ ”32 The complexities of the symposium notwithstanding (betrayed by the revisionism of the 1971 preface to the edited volumes of the proceedings, which suggests that few were in fact able to agree back in 1966 just what structuralism was),

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1966 was “the year structuralist activity beamed forth most forcefully in intellectual life and the intensity of the mixture of a universe of signs shone forth beyond all established disciplinary frontiers.”33 Yet, to be sure, “systems” and “structures” are not the same thing. Consider Wilden’s warning: “Leaving aside the Light Airborne Multi-Purpose System and the Utility Tactical Transport Aircraft System (both of which are helicopters), it should be noted that the evocation of a ‘systems perspective,’ which is now becoming a fashionable ploy at the contemporary equivalent of cocktail parties, is no guarantee whatsoever against the mispunctuations of the discourse of science.”34 Wilden speaks to the vast applicability of the word “system,” the way in which the scientificity of systems discourse becomes mere scientism when we consider the promiscuity of the word. “Structure,” on the other hand, or “structural,” denoted by the mid- to late 1960s a highly specific kind of system with certain qualities, which various proponents and practitioners of structuralist methods applied to a variety of things. As early as 1949, when Claude Lévi-Strauss published Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (published in English in 1969), the anthropologist deployed the notion of structure to make the groundbreaking claim that kinship was based not on descent, but on the structures of relationships precluded by and mandated in the alliances formed between families when women from one group married men from another.35 Several years later, Lacan would explain structure in his own terms, but the fundamental idea remained the same: “The symbolic order from the first takes on its universal character. It isn’t constituted bit by bit. As soon as the symbol arrives, there is a universe of symbols.”36 And by the late 1960s, Jean Piaget abstracted this notion yet further, remarking that structural elements “do not exist in isolation from one another. . . . They do not come upon the scene except as ordered.”37 Françoise Dosse’s brief history of the term highlights its arrival within linguistic discourse. From the Latin struere, derived from structura, “structure” originally and through the eighteenth century referred to “the manner in which a building is constructed,” but often was used to refer to living beings as well. Eventually applicable to a variety of structures, the term soon came to describe how the parts of a being are built to form a whole. Between 1900 and 1926, the term “structuralism” came into usage; Saus­ sure used the word a few times in his 1916 Course in General Linguistics, where he repeated the word “system” an astounding 138 times in its three hundred pages.38 Later, members of the Prague School generalized the

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use of “structure.” In 1939 the first article that launched the review Acta linguistica referred to “structural linguistics.”39 Structures, we are told, have always been. It is just that by 1966 something more or less officially had occurred in the history of the concept — an “event,” to use the term Derrida did in the paper he delivered at Johns Hopkins, or, more pointedly, a “rupture” (effectively “breaking” [rumpere] that which had been earlier “built” [struere].)40 Before this rupture, structure had been thought of as having a center valued as a presence (an “essence, existence, substance, subject”) that legislates it by grounding, orienting, and organizing the structure. Derrida, in the manner for which he would subsequently become famous, questions the logic of this classical sense of presence, which he says haunts even the most recent history of metaphysics. Throughout this history, one center has been successively substituted for another: “eidos, arché, telos, energeia, ousia, . . . aletheia, trancendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth.” Ultimately, Derrida’s paper critiques structuralism and the residual humanism in even Saussure’s reliance on a metaphysics of presence. Through it, Derrida begins to establish the terms for deconstruction. But it is by way of this critique that Derrida also explains the concept of structure as determined by its lack of center, and the structuralist moment as “that in which language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse . . . that is to say, when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences.”41 It is precisely this moment when “everything became discourse . . . , when everything became a system” that I want to invoke with the phrase “the antihumanist turn” in this book’s title. In the following chapters, I assemble close readings of one international art exhibition (chapter 1, on the Information show, 1970), the work of three artists (chapter 2, on Robert Morris; chapter 3, on Robert Smithson; chapter 4, on Mary Kelly), and one especially influential art historical paradigm (Rosalind Krauss’s 1979 essay, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” also the subject of chapter 3). While many may have been my subjects, I have made my choices based on the ways in which these represent, anticipate, reflect, and / or resist conceptualist aesthetics and rhetorics. This book situates these aesthetics and rhetorics under the sign of “antihumanism”— rather than simply “structuralism,” “poststructuralism,” or even “postmodernism”— because that term

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more capably ropes together the nuances of all three with the twentiethcentury shift away from humanism. And, in part, I take my lead from a number of artists, Robert Morris and Robert Smithson among them, who also used the term “antihumanism.” Furthermore, I say “the antihumanist turn,” rather than “the antihumanist shift,” “imaginary,” or even, with Derrida, “rupture,” because the gesture of turning is itself both endemic to the discourse and suggests a way to critically engage our long-lasting investment in it. Recall (as I do time and again throughout this book) the structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser’s influential account of ideology and subject formation narrativized in his 1970 essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In that account, the human subject forcibly comes into being by the very gesture of turning — specifically, around and toward an authoritative and disembodied voice representative of structure itself. For Althusser, he who answers the interpellatory call is subjected by this “mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion.”42 It is this subject who inhabits and represents the very condition and predicament of belatedness. He is, we are told, always-already turned around, always-already turned away from all that precedes the interpellatory moment. In other words, Althusser’s proposition that there is an individual that precedes the subject is just “convenient” and “clarifying”— a way to tell a story — but within the structuralist worldview, it is wholly fantasmatic and not at all real. The turning is already in place. With it we must begin. Moreover, the figure of the turn underwrites the whole of this book and serves as its organizing principle.43 When I say “turn,” I mean to refer first and foremost to the twentieth-century shift away from humanism, for which structuralism served as a conceptual motor. Additionally, I employ, as Althusser does, the word “turn” to refer to the physical conversion that is said to produce the subject. There is, I argue, much at stake in figuring subjection in such a way. Further, my readers will soon see that turning appears in a range of maneuvers in the work I examine here: Robert Morris, Rosalind Krauss, and Mary Kelly each add to this field particular forms of what one might call (indeed Morris himself does) “turning away,” while Robert Smithson rejoins by proposing the value of a turn that is unique to the material formation of something seemingly far afield from this theoretical terrain: the crystal. Ultimately, I argue that these turns recuperate the figurative nature of the gesture of turning itself and, in effect, seek to restore affectivity to the disaffected, antihumanist subject.

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In the course of these turns, this book proceeds in the following manner: in chapter 1, I identify conceptualism’s and structuralism’s aesthetics and rhetorics with what I call the dream of the information world — a dream (or nightmare for many) of the world as a total sign system. Such a fantasy sometimes promises revolution, but just as often it threatens to alienate the sign from its referent, the subject from the world. Museum of Modern Art curator Kynaston McShine’s 1970 exhibition, Information, shows us the aesthetic and affective complexities of this dream. For the artists involved in this exhibition, engaging the dream of the information world entailed contending with its fictions, aspirations, and limitations, even as they risked entanglement in the very systems they deployed. In chapter 2, I zero in on the figure of a “system” in Robert Morris’s artistic practice, first in his proto-conceptual works of the early 1960s — wherein systems do the work of managing the affective experience of the antihumanist subject. They also foretell Morris’s political work that would come about by the end of that decade. These systems get reconfigured again in 1973, when Morris began an exceptionally sustained practice of drawing with his eyes closed. Positioning not phenomenology (as many have) but structuralism as the critical discourse for reading Morris’s work, I argue that the Blind Time drawings (1973 – 2009) deploy the artistic gesture of turning away in order to make room, as Morris says, for “the world to enter into the art.” This world, it turns out, finds its irreducible ground not in systems of arbitrary signifiers, but in movement, affect, and something Morris calls “the motivated.”44 As much as systems discourse could be said to have invaded the aesthetic field by the 1960s to produce what we have come to call conceptual art, so, too, did it profoundly impact art historical modes of reading works of art. The case of the 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” is the subject of my third chapter, for it was in the pages of that extremely influential essay that the art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss brought structuralist notions into the discussion of modernist art for the first time. What concerns me here is the descriptor “expanded,” which Krauss wants to claim for both the field of sculptural art practices, circa 1970, as well as her systematic interpretation of it. By returning us once more to the figure of turning, the work of one of Krauss’s central subjects, Robert Smithson (who likewise tends to see systems everywhere), poses a rather expansive critique of so much expansionistic rhetoric. Unlike Morris and Smithson, Mary Kelly in the 1970s relied overtly

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on conceptualist strategies and the elaborately theoretical paradigms that emerged in tandem with structuralist linguistics. In her Post-Partum Document (1973 – 79), the subject of my fourth chapter, I argue that the theoretical paradigms and informational “look” of the work must be read as a kind of noise that surrounds it yet does not circumscribe its meaning, though it makes a claim to, all the while keeping its viewers captivated by it. Thus, in reconsidering the Document’s record of the gradual abduction of one subject by the symbolic — that is, of the child’s turning around — I hope to illuminate Kelly’s disclosure of her own captivation with the dream of an information world. For her love of its aesthetics and its rhetorics represents our own. Her affective life speaks to the lure that those paradigms have had over many artists and scholars, alike, for decades. Indeed, they shaped the political aspirations of Kelly’s day, informed the aesthetic commitments of many of her contemporaries, and entrenched a picture of the world predicated on the radical foreclosure of a more expansive subjectivity. Many and varied were the critical strategies that artists developed in order to find their way through, around, or beside the systemic prison structure in which they found themselves — so much so that it would be impossible to write a typology that could adequately cover the range. While my examination of the Information exhibition in chapter 1 aims to convey precisely this sense of breadth and variety, in chapters 2, 3, and 4, my focus narrows into more compact, close readings. My treatment of Robert Morris centers on how the artist, in order to “target” the great “rotting sack of Humanism,” devised ironically “closed” systems, parodically modeled after the sort that the antihumanist subject finds himself trapped within.45 From the circuitously self-reflective self-portraits and fastidiously self-enclosed objects of the early 1960s, to the task-driven Blind Time drawings he began in 1973, Morris’s systems engage the fading possibility for self-consciousness and self-representation — the fear (as the 1962 work Card File makes so clear) of being rendered pure discourse. In so doing, his systems produce affective side effects. They create a space for feeling. The problem of feeling and its management within structures drawn, built, written, and lived is, finally, the compound object of this book, the aggregation of the various subjects under study, each of whom developed strategies that engage this problem. If, by 1970, Morris’s approach had evolved into the production of closed systems that were in fact porous and, therefore, open to the body and affectivity, then Robert Smithson’s tack was to invoke many systems — perspectival, cartographic, and miner-

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alogical, among them — only in order to dislocate them and, by extension, our scopic and affective relationship to their visual regimes.46 This critical strategy reflects Smithson’s abiding interest not just in the antihumanist turn, but also in tropology more generally. His twists and torques — drawn, written, and built — work to make available, to quote the artist once again, “more fragile states of mind.”47 Such fervent quotation of systems is, for Smithson, something of an underhanded gesture: ironic at times, manneristic at others, and not just about systematicity, but also directed at the act of quotation itself. On the other hand, while Mary Kelly also quotes furiously from a range of critical discourses, deploying diagrams, schemas, and theoretical apparatuses over and again, Post-Partum Document in fact demonstrates that even the most “arbitrary” of signifiers can become cathexes for affect and investment.

From the Aesthetic of Information to the Management of Affect For affect theorists, one of the most memorable claims about the anti­ humanist turn and the purported repression — or, more radically, foreclosure — of affective experience that accompanies it comes from Fredric Jameson, who in 1991 wrote in “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” that “postmodernism presumably signals . . . [t]he end of the bourgeois ego, or monad . . . [and t]he end of the psychopathologies of that ego — what I have been calling the waning of affect.” But it means the end of much more — the end, for example, of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brush stroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction). As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling. This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings — which it may be better and more accurate, following J.-F. Lyotard, to call “intensities”— are now free-floating and impersonal and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria. . . .48

Today few would contest the counterclaim that affect does not go away — not least because in the past ten to fifteen years, so many have been busy writ-

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ing about it. As Rei Terada argues, even “poststructuralist theory deploys implicit and explicit logics of emotion and, as its very critics point out, willingly dramatizes particular emotions.” About the “death of the subject,” she adds: “emotion entails this death.”49 Of course, few deaths are emotionless. And if we heed the point made by Anne Wagner when she writes about the death of Clement Greenberg’s historicism brought about by the art historian Rosalind Krauss’s structuralist turn — a “coup” she calls it — t hen it becomes clear that emotion just gets kept under wraps. It is “hidden,” as it were, “in plain sight.”50 “The coup,” imagines Wagner, “is bloodless: a palace revolution staged without a shot. All that is needed . . . is a single presupposition: the ‘acceptance of definitive ruptures and the possibility of looking at historical process from the point of view of logical structure.’ ”51 Bloodless and bodiless this death may be, but it does not come off without feeling. The fact is that in this era of belatedness, affect gets managed or, rather, “administrated” differently, to deploy the word that Benjamin Buchloh brought to bear on our reading of conceptual art.52 In sum, one of the things that I hope to illuminate here is that the very condition of belatedness — t he experience of so many effects — is engaged and resisted via affect produced in and secured by many artworks of the conceptualist type. This very “now” theme was — indeed, must have been — a preoccupying one for this art, some of it almost half a century old. But I should say upfront that while my own stake in conceptualism and in structuralisms is represented by the central polemic of this book, my investment in the relatively newer phenomenon of “affect theory” is more speculative. In these pages, I draw loosely from a range of affect theorists including Sigmund Freud, Brian Massumi, Rei Terada, and Sianne Ngai.53 By and large, I deploy the term “affect,” but not with the intent of precluding the possibility that I might also mean “emotion” or “feeling.” And while I acknowledge the care that many have taken to distinguish between such terms, my terminological choices have been largely guided by the tack and tone taken in the works of art in question as well as an abiding faithfulness that I have to Freudian thought, which speaks as much to “feeling theory” as it does to my own affective life.54 Some of the more familiar and formalized understandings of affect that the reader should keep in mind throughout these pages include Freud’s classic notion of affect as fundamentally mobile in nature (as he argued in his 1894 paper “The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence”), and also fundamentally figurative and figuring (as represented

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by The Interpretation of Dreams).55 In addition, I draw much from Ngai’s and Terada’s approach to the affects as “unusually knotted or condensed ‘interpretations of predicaments’— that is, signs that not only render visible different registers of problem (formal, ideological, sociohistorical) but conjoin these problems in a distinctive manner.”56 As Brian Massumi points out, following Lawrence Grossberg, “there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect. Our entire vocabulary has derived from theories of signification that are still wedded to structure.”57 And since the structural model relies on a positional framework, affectivity falls within “the space of the crossing, the gaps between positions on the grid.” There it has been relegated, Massumi adds evocatively, to “a theoretical no-body’s land.”58 To Massumi’s notion of a disembodied (or even de-bodied, disowned, or dis-possessed) “land” of theory, the works of art and art historical work that I consider in this book make clear how contested that negated body is and, further, track the ways in which the body and its affects nonetheless continue — as Robert Morris puts it — to “assert the endless wonder: ‘Still there!,’ ” even after so many “deaths” (of the author, the individual, art, even the subject) have been announced.59 Moreover, I have endeavored to allow the works of art under consideration to intervene in the field of affect theory in their own visual lexicon produced in media as varied as photography, sculpture, drawing, and performance, and in idioms as seemingly distinct as the scientific diagram, the art historical essay, the sculptural interpretation of a drawing, and the dusty print of the artist’s hand. Yet I do not believe that it is adequate to say that affective life persists in spite of the claims, power, promise, or stranglehold of antihumanist thought. As Terada reminds us, “Conversation about emotion often attempts to supply a sense of substantiality and purpose where there is and sometimes should be none.”60 That is, there is a sense that affectivity is substantive and, therefore, by itself suffices, discursively speaking. One of the reasons for this kind of thinking is that the temporality of belatedness that inheres in the structuralist framework also presupposes by its design a foreclosed, anterior time (Lacan, for instance, calls it “the hic et nunc of the all”), to which — or so the fantasy goes — we might somehow return. Or, as structuralism’s advocates would have it, we shall never return.61 It is there that all the figures of our humanist past have been relegated and rendered so many remnants of the “unintelligible”: the “individual”; the notions of expression and of style, creativity and freedom; the artist’s touch; materiality and the body; the myriad myths of modernism; and so on. Add

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to this pile of humanist bones — as Rosalind Krauss once did — modernist sculpture itself. Such is the chronopolitics of the structuralist worldview. Moreover, as an account of the aesthetico-theoretical figures of a belated information world, this book also tracks some of the most important ways in which artists and art historians alike worked to figure and transfigure this other “convenient” and “clarifying,” fictive and forgotten space-time — this antepartum.62 Finally, a word about this book’s title: Systems We Have Loved. With it, I mean to signal that there exists an identificatory position — a “we”— from which there has been, over the past fifty years or so, an opportunity to love. Most immediately, “we” is meant to represent the extensiveness of structuralism’s reach as well as the totalizing nature of the ambitions held out by its fantasy, both of which have underwritten “our” libidinal investments in the discourse and the aesthetics under study here. Yet, as with all invocations of the third-person plural, questions of inclusion and exclusion follow closely. Who counts among the group? Who does not? The figures that I examine in this book are all practitioners, most of them white, who operated within highly visible and institutionally privileged artistic and discursive sites during the period in question. These descriptors do not, of course, tell us everything; indeed, the crux of this book’s argument is that structural positionality cannot tell us enough or even, at times, what we most need to know. Nevertheless, knowing these facts serves to specify the common and generally privileged structural position to which each of them — artists, art historian, and curator alike — acceded. In turn, this specificity helps to circumscribe the imagined reach of that “we,” to historicize its often ahistorical claims and to clarify who, precisely, was permitted to recognize and be recognized by those systems and to speak for — even if in a critical way — this collective entity. What is it, then, that “we” have loved? Whose systems? Which ones? My title is meant to recall, at once, the linguistic system imagined by Ferdinand de Saussure, the anthropological systems of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the interpretative system of Algirdas Julien Greimas, and the psychic ones of Jacques Lacan. Simultaneously, the word “systems” in my title is meant to invoke the variety that were put to use and invented by many artists, from the systematically derived structures of Sol LeWitt to the parodically closed systems of Robert Morris; from the crystalline systems that Robert Smithson seems to have taken his lead from, to the art historical systems

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on offer by Rosalind Krauss — and so many more in between. Finally, it is the oddity of “our” having loved systems — of all things — that I want to be felt by the union of these words. Systems would seem unworthy of our affection, being, by nature, impersonal and dehumanized. What have “we” stood to gain by being amorous? Perhaps, I suggest, it has been the opportunity for new attachment itself, even as that attachment disavows, just as it announces, the loss and disaffection of subjectivity at its core.

1. The Dream of the Information World

The world is really going to hell in a toboggan, and I’m putting these boxes together. . . . But, you know, that’s not the point. The point is . . . [that the idea is] followed absolutely to its conclusion, which is mechanistic. It has no validity as anything except a process in itself. It has nothing to do with the world at all. — Sol LeWitt (1969)

Look at a print of a drawing produced by Sol LeWitt in 1967, and then used as the announcement for an exhibition of his work at the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles that year (fig. 1.1). The drawing is a plan for four sets of nine pieces. One of these sets LeWitt has described graphically in both gridded form and written language. Take a grid, subdivide it into nine smaller, equivalent grids, then mark off each as its own isolated “piece.” LeWitt has done just this, and then he has numbered the pieces from one to nine — a designation that appears to be their only distinguishing mark. Otherwise, these pieces appear to be completely identical, having been produced by the grid’s fail-safe system of equivalences. But look more closely and you’ll see that LeWitt’s drawing is actually asking us to imagine these nine pieces as distinct — he indicates this with a list of measurements jotted at the foot of the print. In fact, this set of nine pieces is more like Serial Project #1 (ABCD) from 1966 – 68 than the grid diagram would have us think (fig. 1.2). Each piece in the print is defined by the uniqueness of its variation. Like Serial Project, the print represents a field of cubic forms that rise to incremental heights, in the way an urban landscape or miniature architectural model appears from above. But the

1.1  Sol LeWitt, announcement card for Sol LeWitt exhibition at Dwan Gallery, 1967. Printed announcement, 35.6 × 35.6 cm. © 2012 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston.

The Dream of the Information World

drawn set would be better described not as architectural or even inhabitable, but as structural. In fact, the artist prefers the term “structure,” to the more usual one, “sculpture.”1 By 1967, the year LeWitt created this particular structure, the rules of structural order were widely and readily applied to nearly every field of cultural inquiry — mathematics, the empirical sciences, the social sciences, especially anthropology and psychology, and of course linguistics. In fact, by that year practitioners from a wide range of fields were calling upon the laws of structural order to examine and explain an extraordinarily vast range of cultural phenomena. In 1968 Jean Piaget, among many others, sought to define what exactly a structure is. In his terms, a structure is “not a mere collection of elements and their properties,” but rather it “involve[s] laws: the structure is preserved or enriched by the interplay of its transformation laws, which never yield results external to the system nor employ

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1.2  Sol LeWitt, Serial Project #1 (ABCD), 1966–68. Painted steel, 9.5 × 70 × 70 in. Westfalisches Landesmuseum, Münster, Germany. © 2012 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

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elements that are external to it.”2 The kind of structure I see LeWitt employing accords with Piaget’s definition; it is a system of transformations. Looking closely at LeWitt’s set of nine pieces, we can grasp that his grid’s law of equivalences is actually used to spawn differences. There are only differences in LeWitt’s structure. The meaning of each piece is not immanent in it, much in the same way that structuralist linguistics teaches us that the letters that form the word “cat” have no intrinsic meaning; they mean because they are not “cap” or “cad” or “bat.” Furthermore, both field and module in LeWitt’s structure are organized in such a way that precludes breaking the system, for the elements of any structure are always subordinate to its laws. Piaget explains that the elements “do not exist in isolation from one another, nor were they discovered one by one in some accidental sequence and then, finally, united into a whole. They do not come upon the scene except as ordered.”3 We could say, therefore, that LeWitt’s structure is predicated on the obdurate incontestability of the peculiar temporality of its order — always-already present as whole, like a grid whose elements come into being together and all at once, in an extraordinarily democratic way, in the very moment that the horizontal-vertical pattern is laid down. Moreover, to consider any one piece from LeWitt’s set will always be an activity inextricable from the conceptual integrity of the whole. Be sure to notice, as well, that LeWitt’s grids do not actually operate for the work of art like a framework, as in the case of a picture rendered in one-point perspective; the grid structure does not function, as Lawrence Alloway has put it, “as the invisible servicing of the work of art.” Rather, the grid structure is, as Alloway says, the “visible skin” of the work. He adds, emphatically, “it is not . . . an underlying composition, but a factual display.”4 And so if LeWitt’s structure pictures a world — as I want to suggest it does — it does not do so in the way that we ordinarily associate with pictures. His grid does not serve as the armature for a scene represented, or for a ground with or without figures upon it. In fact, if LeWitt’s structure could be said to indicate anything at all, it would be the very assurance that everything has been brought to the surface, or better, that the relationship between surface and depth, disclosure and hiddenness, visibility and invisibility, has been extinguished. LeWitt’s grid declares that “everything is here.” And it does so with a self-generated sense of autonomy, like a miniature world created ex nihilo. Even if we can’t actually see it, everything is accounted for by the structural system, everything has been subsumed into its order of equivalences. Everything has been brought into absolute vis-

The Dream of the Information World

ibility, only now visibility is not a property of looking or even of the visual, but a figure of epistemic mastery. This reconfiguration of the visible is critical here, not just for the selfdefinition of so-called conceptual art, but, more importantly, for the worldview out of which LeWitt’s grid and so many other works of art like it grew. LeWitt’s grid renounces the visual and, in its place, proposes that there is a deeper, structural logic governing its form that cannot, nor even need, be seen with our eyes. In 1967, just one year after the year most often cited as the start date for conceptual art, LeWitt turned this sort of practice into something of a mantra: “What the work of art looks like isn’t too important.”5 His language seems straightforward; he explains that, on the one hand, there is an art of the mind and, on the other, an art of the eye. LeWitt was not alone in making statements such as this; his words may stand in here for those of dozens of practitioners who might have said the same: Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, and Douglas Huebler come first to my mind. “Art is not necessarily a visual experience,” Huebler proclaimed two years later. “Art [is] the thing that comes into your head — and not . . . a visual thing. You see, by using the visual thing and then suspending it, then the art has to be located in the idea and away from the visual appearance, you see.” For Huebler, even seeing is not a thing of vision, but a figure of speech for grasping the concept.6 Indeed, LeWitt reiterated his disavowal of the visual within this very print. “These pieces should be made without regard for their appearance,” he scrawled alongside the grid plan — as if to announce, along with the opening of his show at the Dwan Gallery, that we won’t find what we’re looking for by looking.7 Appearances should be disregarded. Above all, it is the look of LeWitt’s print that nearly causes us to overlook the obscurities of his language and swallow whole his stated disavowal of the visual. On first glance, it seems there is nothing to look at in the work; it is too lean, too stripped, too “pre-fact[ual],” to use his word — always before something else that never fully arrives.8 Or perhaps it is because when one looks, as Donald Kuspit has surmised, “one does not so much see [the work] as think about [it], in part because the seeing . . . is quickly and fastidiously done.”9 And when we do look, we quickly come up against the challenges of description. “It’s like getting words caught in your eyes,” wrote Robert Smithson after laying his eyes on this print.10 But what if we asked — in spite of LeWitt’s derogation of the visual, in the face of language’s recalcitrance to being looked at, over and against the

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elusive transparency of the grid — what does the print look like? If we are to see this print as a species of the visual and understand the world that its aesthetic pictures, then we will have to read its structure with an eye to form, as one reads a dream. We will have to attend to the strategies of withholding that have shaped that which is, despite all claims to the contrary, certainly given to be seen. To show how the visual matters to this work and so many others like it, I will advance three claims, each describing what LeWitt’s print “looks like.” Then, by way of an examination of the Information show, held at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1970, I will elaborate the depth of their significance and explain what each has to do with the others. My first claim: LeWitt’s Untitled looks like information. This is not just because the drawing informs us of the rules and specifications for the nine pieces, but also because the print has the look of information — to rethink Kuspit’s figuration “the look of thought.”11 As I will elaborate shortly, this “look of information” permits us to understand the technological imaginary of its historical moment. My second claim will come as no surprise to readers of conceptual art: this drawing also looks like language. This is not merely because the drawing is largely composed of written form, but also because it has the look of language. To understand this idea, we will need to consider carefully the structuralist imaginary of this historical moment — t he range of cultural forms language was said to represent and encompass, and the ways in which it was understood to perform that representation. And lastly, my third claim: LeWitt’s Untitled print also looks like a work of art in a time of crisis, at least a late twentieth-century rendition. “The world is really going to hell in a toboggan,” the artist said in a 1969 interview with Patricia Norvell, “and I’m putting these boxes together. . . . But, you know,” he continues, “the point is [that the idea is] followed absolutely to its conclusion, which is mechanistic. It has no validity as anything except a process in itself. It has,” he concludes, “nothing to do with the world at all.”12 This look, I will explain, has everything to do with the world: not just contemporary events, movements, and catastrophes, of which there were so many at this time, but also the way in which we conceive of the world — not if it exists, for that would be to return to the inquiry of Descartes’s “Meditation VI,” in which the existence of the world is predicated on its presence to his faculty of knowledge alone, as he says, “the power and inward vision of my mind.”13 LeWitt’s print matters to the world with regard to the questioning

The Dream of the Information World

of — as the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty frames it — “what it is for [the world] to exist.”14 “Information,” “language,” and “the world” are far from self-evident terms. In fact, we have to read each as a piece of a much larger and more complex fantasmatic field. This is crucial if we are ever to understand truly what this visually confounding idiom was trying to say and why it erupted in the form of the visual in the first place. These terms are critical not just for understanding a single print by Sol LeWitt, but also for coming to terms with American art practice of the 1960s and ’70s, when the linguistic forms and structural systems that appear in the print became a common lexicon often hitched to the word “information.” That word we have come to associate more closely with the turn of the twenty-first century than with the 1960s and ’70s. “Information” would seem to have more to do with present-day new media practices than with the comparatively clunky conceptualist aesthetic; it would seem to be more at issue with respect to our currently expanding technologies of communication, the Internet, bioinformatics, even information warfare and the U.S. Defense Department’s originally named Total Information Awareness program, designed to mine databases for information to aid in the identification of terrorists. Indeed, the “informational” aesthetic prevalent around 1970 anticipates our present day. Here my primary aim is to explain how this aesthetic permits us to understand the broader cultural imaginary of the period surrounding the year 1970, its relationship to fantasies about contemporary technologies of communication and the politics that grew up with such fantasies. We know that the aims of these artistic practitioners were aesthetic and political. They embraced the critique of institutionalism, the reformulation of the relationship between art and audience, and the radical democratization of artistic production and consumption. That much many scholars have already made clear.15 But the deeper structure of the ideas and stakes with which artists were profoundly engaged — t his, too, has been overlooked. For even a work of art with an extreme economy of visual means is not the same as “not . . . a visual thing,” to recall Huebler’s phrasing. Even a total negation of visibility still counts for the visible world. Take, for instance, Robert Barry’s 1969 series of announcements stating that for the duration of the exhibition the gallery would be closed (fig. 1.3). Or consider Adrian Piper’s Withdrawal Statement (1970), which replaced the work of art she withdrew from the Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects exhibition at the New York Cultural Center:

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1.3  Robert Barry, detail from Closed Gallery; The Gallery Will Be Closed, 1969. One element from work consisting of three announcements, offset on paper, 5 ½ × 5 ½ in. [Eugenia Butler announcement]. Originally executed by Eugenia Butler, Los Angeles; Art & Project, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Published by Galleria Sperone, Torino. Artist’s project published in conjunction with show held March 10 – 21, 1969. © Robert Barry. Courtesy of Robert Barry and Specific Object, New York.

The Dream of the Information World

The work originally intended for this space has been withdrawn. The decision to withdraw has been taken as a protective measure against the increasingly pervasive conditions of fear. Rather than submit the work to the deadly and poisoning influence of these conditions, I submit its absence as evidence of the inability of art expression to have meaningful existence under conditions other than those of peace, equality, truth, trust and freedom.16

Both Barry and Piper represent a widespread belief in the aesthetic and political capacities of invisibility, withholding, and withdrawal as artistic strategies. Yet for all the economizing, negating, and conceptualizing that they and their contemporaries performed over the years, I want to claim that those strategies are, paradoxical though it may seem, the very means by which the artwork permits us to see what we otherwise could not. Abbreviated, stripped, informational, structural — what the work of art under these conditions shows us is that within the broader cultural imaginary the seemingly disparate discursive fields of “language” and “information” had become closely linked — condensed, combined, intertwined, quite like two otherwise unrelated terms might appear together as one in a dream. This is a dream of a world: a representation of what is before that and, at once, within which we find ourselves. And it is a dream that for nearly fifty years now has been normative and binding for us.17 This dream, and the wish that motivated it, is the subject of this chapter.

Information, 1970 In an exhibition review, the critic Gregory Battcock conjures the Information show as a series of contradictory propositions: Imagine: 1. an art exhibition that started out by inviting artists’ contributions without anybody having seen the works first; 2. an exhibition with a catalog that will illustrate over 100 works — many of which will not be included in the show; 3. a catalog that lists artists that aren’t represented in the show at all; 4. an exhibition that includes works that are not included. . . .18

The Information show, organized around what its curator Kynaston McShine called the “strongest ‘style’ ” of the period, opened in New York at the Museum of Modern Art in July 1970 (figs. 1.4 – 1.6).19 This was one year

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1.4  Installation view of the exhibition Information. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, July 2–September 20, 1970. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. 1.5  Installation view of the exhibition Information. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, July 2–September 20, 1970. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

The Dream of the Information World

after the critic Lucy Lippard began to organize a series of exhibitions marking the emergence of conceptual art on the international scene. Included were textual statements, diagrams, notes, proposals, photographs, and films clips. There were systems of varied sorts, including Vito Acconci’s Service Area, an installation in which the artist collected and retrieved his mail, having had it forwarded by the post office to the museum (fig. 1.7). Inspired in part by information and systems theories, and in part by a desire to imagine an alternative social order, the Information show amplified the conditions of visibility that I have described as definitive of LeWitt’s print. In some cases, the work included in the exhibition wasn’t actually present, or at a minimum that presence resisted ordinary notions of visibility. Consider Jan Dibbets’s catalogue contribution, consisting of nothing other than the request to be represented by a form alone, which had been distrib-

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1.6  Installation view of the exhibition Information. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, July 2–September 20, 1970. Gelatin-silver print, 7 × 9 ½ in. (17.8 × 24.1 cm). Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Photo: James Mathews. The Museum of Modern Art, New York NY, U.S.A. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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uted to all invited artists (fig. 1.8). Indeed, the show itself had something of an informational consistency. McShine uses the word “transmitted” to describe the method by which some of the work would get from its point of origin to its audience.20 Certainly this exhibition reconceived what it meant to be a viewer, perhaps following the model of an information system of the sort diagrammed in Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, a text we find listed under “Recommended Reading” at the back of the exhibition catalogue. Sense perception as data transmission. This international exhibition brought together over 150 artists from countries including Argentina, Belgium, France, West Germany, Japan, Yugoslavia, and the United States. As McShine’s catalogue essay proposes, Information was an effort to reevaluate how an artist might go about making a mark on a world beset by the “almost universal phenomena” of “general social, political, and economic crises.”

The Dream of the Information World

If you are an artist in Brazil, you know of at least one friend who is being tortured; if you are one in Argentina, you probably have had a neighbor who has been in jail for having long hair, or for not being “dressed” properly; and if you are living in the United States, you may fear that you will be shot at, either in the universities, in your bed, or more formally in Indochina. It may seem too in­appropriate, if not absurd, to get up in the morning, walk into a room, and apply dabs of paint from a little tube to a square of canvas. What can you as a young artist do that seems relevant and meaningful? 21

McShine’s query — what can the arts really do? — looks for a medium or mode of response that artists could adopt to rise to the task of representation and action. The show itself, by projecting that question into the contemporary idiom, did not so much give answers to McShine’s query as reiterate its asking. And for us, some thirty years later, now saturated in

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1.7  Vito Acconci, Service Area, 1970. Installation / activity lasting for three months, various days, varying times each day, with plastic table, Plexiglas box, paper calendar, and mail. Kenny Schacter collection. © Acconci Studio. Image courtesy of the artist.

1.8 (opposite) Jan Dibbets, page 43 from Information, ed. Kynaston L. McShine (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1970). Offset, printed in black, 10 ¾ × 8 ¼ in. The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. © 2012 Jan Dibbets  / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. 1.9  John Posato, “The School of Visual Arts Scholarship Fund, Inc. and Dayton’s Gallery 12 Announce: Carl Andre, Larry Bell, Michael Heizer, Donald Judd, Alan Kaprow, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenberg, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra and Andy Warhol in Straight Information: A Dialogue Series of 13 Separate Evenings,” 1971. Offset, printed in color, 23 × 16  7⁄8 in. (83.8 × 42.9 cm). Kynaston McShine, Information Exhibition Research, 11.14. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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the rhetorics of information, the Information show poses this query: What does it mean to formulate the question of art’s urgency and utility under the sign of information? We can chart the imaginary terrain of this governing term in the following ways. First of all, we know that the word was repeatedly used in relation to conceptual art practice: in the titling of artworks (e.g., Joseph Kosuth’s Information Room, 1970); in seminal essays on conceptual art (e.g., Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin’s “Information,” 1972); and as an organizing rubric for exhibitions, public events, and their documentation (fig. 1.9). “Information” signaled a scientistic aesthetic in which the artwork was abstracted down to its “essential” aspects and conveyed through linguistic data or structural system. This stylistic was representative of a larger movement toward what Joseph Kosuth has called “infrastructural analysis”: the practice of interrogating the invisible structures that secure the ideological function of art and its economic, historical, and cultural values.22 Second, the Information show also permits us to see that when the work of art assumes this mode of “straight information” (as opposed to the would-be “indirection,” “distraction,” “obfuscation,” even “deviance” associated with visual representation), it takes on the formal structure of information in the technological sense of the word.23 That structure is represented in the exhibition catalogue many times over — consider one example: a photograph pictures the pockmarked surface of the planet Mars and, on the opposing page, a grid of zeros and ones provides the corresponding digital information, as it was radioed on July 14, 1965, by the Mariner 4, the first spacecraft to obtain and transmit close-range images of the planet (fig. 1.10). McShine’s exhibition archive indicates that the Mars “binary data dump” had been previously included in the Austrian contribution to the 14th Triennale di Milano, held in 1968, for which the theme “the great number” was adopted partially in response to the recent location and computation of the largest-known prime number. “We must become abstract even where we deal with the physical world,” Oskar Morgenstern writes in that exhibition’s catalogue. “Worldly images, pictures, measuring rods cannot cope with the world,” he concluded.24 Some have surmised that artists had snatched the discourse of information from the field of communications engineering with which they were excessively impressed. It seems more likely that artists embraced its rhetorics because they were deeply immersed in the ideological fantasy that accompanied informational processes — namely, that information and

The Dream of the Information World

communication technologies were, as Marshall McLuhan put it, “programming our world to bits” by stripping it of detail, paring away phenomenal “excess,” and reducing it to data to be used. McShine included in his exhibition files an image (fig. 1.11) drawn from McLuhan’s so-called DEW-LINE newsletters, whose title McLuhan, in turn, had adopted from the “Distant Early Warning” system of radar trackers in northern Canada. Jointly operated with the United States, that system was designed to detect enemy missiles aimed at the North American continent. McLuhan remarked that when art is most significant it “is a DEW Line, a . . . system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”25 Certainly, then, there must also be a relationship (underexamined and hard to detect though it may be) between the military, this “informational” aesthetic, and information warfare. One need look only as far as the Information exhibition catalogue cover to see the fantasy of “information overload and pattern recognition” at work (fig. 1.12). A grid of abstracted lithographic images of contemporary tech-

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1.10  Page 144 from Information, ed. Kynaston L. McShine (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1970). Offset, printed in black, 10  ¾ × 8 ¼ in. The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

1.11  Page 6 from The DEW-LINE Newsletter: Megascene Section, by Marshall McLuhan. New York, Human Development 1, no. 8 (February 1969). Offset, printed in black, page size: 10 3⁄8 × 8 3⁄8 in. Department of Painting and Sculpture, “Information” Records, 1.11b. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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1.12  Cover of Information, ed. Kynaston L. McShine (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1970). Offset, printed in color, 10 ¾ × 8 ¼ in. The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

nologies of communication — an Instamatic camera, an IBM Selectric, a cruise ship, a Volkswagen Beetle, a portable television — together proposed that all forms of discourse had similarly achieved and suffered from a flattening and totalizing informational consistency.26 Considered together, the aesthetic of information and information in the technological sense of word gave rise to the following notion: The world itself had become an information system. And with the exigencies of the contemporary political scene, the exhibition announced the desperate realization that if the

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1.13 (opposite) Siah Armajani, page 7 from Information, ed. Kynaston L. McShine (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1970). Offset, printed in black, 10 ¾ × 8 ¼ in. The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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world was an information system, then its subjects must be information subjects, and like the pattern of digital data, all were irreversibly alienated from the signified. Just as Mars was being made determinate by that grid of zeros and ones, it was also rendered radically contingent. Artists took up this fantasy, but, significantly, they did so in the spirit of interrogation and experimentation, often moving between conviction, suspended judgment, and profound doubt. What — art viewers were asked — can and cannot be accounted for by the modular structure of information? Are zeros and ones truly adequate to the task of representing this world? It was the artist Siah Armajani who most directly prompted these questions in his contribution to the exhibition (fig. 1.13). The work, titled A Number Between Zero and One, began with just that — specifically, the number 10 −205,714,079, which the artist had printed out and stacked as a nine-foot column of paper (fig. 1.14). The work wonders, worries, indeed obsesses over the question of what happens between zero and one (fig. 1.15). As Armajani had figured it, the answer was, of course, absurd — all 28.5714 hours of its print-out time. All the same, we can also see the work as an effort to render palpable the terrain not accounted for by the structural logic of information. Armajani rendered that terrain in the aesthetic of information — with computer, paper, and typed text — indeed, an “aesthetic of administration,” to invoke Benjamin Buchloh’s notion.27 After all, paper’s surface is the very site of our institutional practices; on it, we map the world, graph the rise and fall of the economy, certify our titles, legalize our relations. But in Armajani’s nine-foot stack, paper’s behavior subverts such functionality. One sheet after another, surface abuts surface, two dimensions become three, abstract space becomes real. In Armajani’s contribution, information has been squeezed out by presence of the material world itself. As for zeros and ones alone, try and try as they may, they will never be able to account for this world — or so Armajani’s rejoinder insists. Thus the imaginary associated with the word “information” at this exhibition brought together, on the one hand, the conceptualist notion of art as “infrastructural analysis” and, on the other, forms and fantasies derived from communication technologies. But that was not all. The word also represented, third and finally, matters of global political urgency. If there was a crisis of world proportions, then this exhibition made clear that it had to do not simply with the U.S. invasion of Cambodia or the killing of the Kent State student protesters by the National Guard. Rather, artists contended with the idea that they and their work might be complicit. “Information”

1.14  Siah Armajani, A Number Between Zero and One, 1970. Computer printout. © Siah Armajani. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Larry Marcus.

The Dream of the Information World

was, therefore, also about art and action, and art as activism. Thus, artists and activists embraced the notion in their search for new signifying means and revolutionary avenues of information. It was only two months prior to the Information show that a group of people from the New York art community convened to plan to protest against U.S. war activities, specifically by retooling “the art world’s priorities.”28 This group, called the Art Strike Against Racism, War, and Repression, pressured art institutions in New York to close for a two-week period in memory of those slain at Kent State and elsewhere, and as an expression of outrage at governmental policies. What Art Strike withheld from public consumption — quite literally, works of art in their conventional spaces and as conventional modes of viewing — it replaced with forms of information:

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1.15  Siah Armajani, detail of A Number Between Zero and One, 1970. © Siah Armajani. Courtesy of the artist.

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museums were transformed into venues for “information activities,” and material made available there exclaimed: “information! information! you are involved . . . [in a range of discriminatory and repressive practices] . . . unless you stop it!” (fig. 1.16).29 Much of the work included in the Information show embraced the claim that the structures that sustained such repressive practices ran deep. Even facets of experience formerly conceived of as protected from such influences were perceived as produced by the symbolic order. Haacke’s MoMA Poll made this plain by reconfiguring the domain of artistic and spectatorial practice to include the museum’s financial and political affiliations (fig. 1.17). The work asked viewers to cast their vote in response to the question: “Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in November?” Nelson Rockefeller’s brother David was the then-chairman of the MoMA board and, at the time of the Information show, Nelson was running for reelection as the self-proclaimed “peace candidate,” despite his support of the Republican Party and its policies in Indochina. Sixty-nine percent of the ballots were cast against the governor.30 “The working premise is to think in terms of systems,” wrote Haacke in his catalogue submission to the related and concurrent exhibition at the New York Cultural Center, Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects: . . . the production of systems, the interference with and the exposure of existing systems. Such an approach is concerned with the operational structure of organizations, in which the transfer of information, energy and / or material occurs. Systems can be physical, biological or social; they can be man-made, naturally existing, or a combination of any of the above. In all cases verifiable processes are referred to.31

Haacke, although certainly not alone in this, brings to light the fundamental claim that haunted this show, which brings together these three valences of information that I have been fleshing out here. This claim goes something like this: Being in the world was not just a matter of being saturated in information. Much more insidiously, the world had become a network of systems, and being a subject in that world meant being subjected by those systems, produced and secured by their authority.32 Such systems, as Haacke has described them, are absolutely totalizing — they are not just informational, but also physical, biological, social, natural, and man-made.

1.16  “Information!” Art Strike poster, 1970. Image courtesy of the Lucy R. Lippard Papers, ca. 1940–2006, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

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1.17  Hans Haacke, MoMA Poll, 1970. 2 transparent acrylic boxes, photoelectric counting devices, paper ballots, boxes: 101.5 × 51 × 25.5 cm each. © Hans Haacke /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Haacke evinces an unusual confidence in this picture of the world and in the capacity of the artwork to intervene into that world system, a conviction not shared by all contributors to the exhibition. His contribution trusted that the information solicited by his work might actually destabilize the governor’s authority. He hoped that this information might challenge that authority at the level of public opinion. And certainly, he believed that works of art could effectively politicize the museum by making political opinion visible inside its walls.33

The Dream of the Information World

Let me take stock here of what I’ve just said, and then try to explain what these claims amount to. It was not simply the case that “information” was a multivalent word that resonated with activists who were mobilizing, became an important signifier for the field of communications engineering, and was seized by artists experimenting with a new stylistic. We cannot read these meanings as one would read a laundry list, as if they merely coexisted side by side. Rather, the Information exhibition suggests that those valences were deeply connected, if not causally, then at the level of the cultural imaginary. Just as the word “information” was being saturated with meaning from so many directions, it was also being interrogated. For the practitioners represented in this exhibition, the field of ideas represented by the word lived, wrestled with, and thrived off of the very same baseline claim: that only within sign systems were the individual and the social comprehensible as such, and that, more profoundly still, the world itself could not be, indeed was not, without the sign. It is, after all, this notion that permits us to think that a grid of zeros and ones could be said to represent, let alone “cope” with, the world. It is also this notion that could be credited with having buoyed McShine’s faith in the idea that an art exhibition could be mounted and viewed in this way — with so much of its material present only as signifier. And of course, it is also this very notion that undergirds the contemporaneous idea that the real is itself nothing more than the effect of its signifier, and therefore could be transformed on every level — economic, political, aesthetic — by effecting it at the level of the sign.34 “It is the sign itself which must be shaken,” as Roland Barthes put it in 1977.35 A sign system can be revolutionary, he says elsewhere, when it “makes the world,” when it “reveal[s] the political load of the world,” and when “language, all of it, is functionally absorbed in this making.”36 It is, finally, also the insistence of the signifier and the structural order of things that the viewer must confront when the object of art is supplanted by language, and the visual is shrouded in the concept. Information was indeed everywhere throughout the exhibition; as for sensation — it had dried up. The world it pictured was a closed field of signs. If this was what it meant for the world to exist, then it had become increasingly difficult to conceive of that world as not already signified, not already accounted for, not already measured by a field of differences — mapped, in the case of Dan Graham’s contribution, as a paradigm of distances measured from the

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artist’s retinal wall to the edge of the known universe, to Union Square, to the corner of Fourteenth Street and First Avenue, to the front door, to the lens of his glasses, or to any other arbitrary point in space (fig. 1.18). Indeed, some courted the very idea of such a world in the form of a seductive, even delicious fear; yet to others, the fear was genuine.

In the Beginning Was the Word What I find myself saying here is that the Information show broached a structuralist worldview, or at least it leaned heavily on structuralism’s principles for its representational means. The exhibition pictured a world predicated on informational saturation and binary codification and, more radically, on the total foreclosure of the real and the bracketing of the human subject. In the structuralist view, the object and the subject are blocked out, and what is left hanging “in the air between them,” as Terry Eagleton explains, is a system of rules. This system, he elaborates, has its own independent life. . . . To say that structuralism has a problem with the individual subject is to put it mildly: that subject was effectively liquidated, reduced to the function of an impersonal structure . . . the new subject was really the system itself, which seemed equipped with all the attributes (autonomy, self-correction, unity and so on) of the traditional individual. . . . However far back we push, however much we hunt for the origin of meaning, we will always find a structure already in place.37

Structuralism’s principles have transformed many fields. Indeed, it can be more accurately described as an “adventure,” rather than a movement, as Étienne Balibar has suggested, due to the fact that it consists, as he says, “as much and more in the testing of the limits of the category that gives it its name as in the construction of its consistency,” which is to say that thinkers of all sorts of orientations “went in” to structuralism only to “c[o]me back out with all these identities upset and their mutual compatibilities and incompatibilities redistributed.”38 Yet to rope in that adventure, to bring the aspects, events, and statements that characterize structuralism under the same sign, we begin by looking to Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of the differential sign, which, having already made a radical impact on the fields of anthropology (with Claude Lévi-Strauss) and psychoanalysis (in the work of Jacques Lacan), was, by the 1960s, applicable to nearly every field of

1.18 (opposite) Dan Graham, page 56 from Information, ed. Kynaston L. McShine (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1970). Offset, printed in black, 10 ¾ × 8 ¼ in. The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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cultural inquiry.39 As Roland Barthes contended in 1967, the whole wide “world of signifieds [was] none other than that of language.”40 Any meaningful system — kinship, the unconscious, the world of commodities — was said to be, or be structured like, a language. Language had become the grid through which the world was pictured. Following Lévi-Strauss and Lacan, Foucault further hypothesized that “meaning was probably only a kind of surface effect, a shimmering foam, and that it was the system that traverses us deeply, that was there before us, that sustains us in time and space.”41 My point here is that we need structuralism to answer the question: What did language and its related forms and structures represent when so many artists came to believe in its aesthetic and political efficacy? My turn to structuralism here is in part an effort to provide a sorely needed account of what exactly “language” stood for around 1970, and to allow that account to weigh in, in my examination of this linguistico-informational style, rather than rely on monolithic notions and ahistorical presumptions about language, what it is, what it does, and how it functions as representation. Take, for example, Richard Serra’s evocative phrase “drawing is another kind of language,” adopted as the title of a 1997 exhibition that brought together works of art, few of which contain elements that are clearly linguistic. How exactly are we meant to use language as a heuristic principle for our looking?42 What qualifies the drawings exhibited there as being like a language? Or, even more to the point, reconsider Benjamin Buchloh’s important claim: “Because the proposal inherent in Conceptual Art was to replace the object of spatial and perceptual experience by linguistic definition alone . . . it thus constituted the most consequential assault on the status of that object.”43 But how language waged that assault Buchloh does not say. What was language in this historical moment? A closed system? A generative grammar? A subject constituting order? A vehicle for repetition? We need to recover structuralism for conceptualism — to understand, first of all, structuralism’s claims and, second, the limitations of those claims as this exhibition presses us to look for them. But let me be clear: I am not proposing that we subsume the whole of the use of language in art, circa 1970, into structuralism, nor am I arguing that we might finally understand this linguistic turn as amounting to structuralism’s creeping its way into the visual field. Rather, it is the visual field that exposes the deep structure of its contemporary episteme, one that has had a profound and lasting impact upon not just the visual arts, but also how we practice the humanities more broadly. When the visual field dresses itself in language,

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it reveals to us the unconscious of that world picture, the deeper structure of the beliefs upon which it is based, as well as its limiting conditions.44 The linguistic turn in the visual arts makes visible for us structuralism’s baseline belief about the nature of meaning and being in a structural world — a world ordered like a grid; a world conceived on the model of “wholeness,” to come back to Jean Piaget’s word, whose elements “do not come on the scene except as [already] ordered.”45 A world where structural order is the means and limits of representation — “the deep structure,” as T. J. Clark puts it, “of symbolic production and reproduction.”46 A world, finally, in which a politics of revolution takes form at the intersection of this significatory science and a kind of absolute visibility —“a (euphoric) dream of scientificity,” to borrow a phrase from Barthes, who would eventually dismiss his own hard-line structuralist position and claim that its aspirations amounted to a totalizing wish to master the master system itself.47 So this is what structuralism maintains: Language is a system of differential signifiers that not only produces “effects” of meaning, but also creates the “world of things” and constitutes the subject itself.48 In this view, we are thrown into language; language precedes and exceeds us, and our relationship to meaning or “value,” to use Saussure’s word, is always bound by the temporal conditions of linguistic structure. “In the beginning was the Word,” mimes the structuralist psychoanalyst Lacan, “which is to say,” he adds, “the signifier.”49 In place of the biblical narrative, Lacan anticipates what Barthes would come to call several years later the “death” of the “Author-God,” the subject who claims the single origin of and final signified for his words. In this move, both word and world become structural. They are to be both “followed” and “run,” as Barthes explains, “(like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath.”50 Relatedly, Piaget would further suggest that structuralism inflicts a kind of death upon the individual subject in him- or herself. That death is the price paid for a sociality predicated on the model of an epistemic “nucleus” common to all subjects. “Structures” have not been the death of the subject or its activities. True, there is much here that stands in need of clarification, and some philosophical traditions have piled up such confusion on the topic that what they call the subject is undermined. Thus, in the first place, structuralism calls for a differentiation between the individual subject, who does not enter at all, and the epistemic subject, that cognitive nucleus which is common to all subjects at the same level.51

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Just as “information” at this moment drew much from structuralism’s imaginary, structuralism, in turn, leaned heavily on notions of the informational. Consider, for example, Jameson’s description of the structuralist principle of binary opposition, according to which the subject’s experience of communication, and being communicated with, sounds more like that of a machine than of a human. He calls it a “technique for simulating perception,” necessitated “when faced with a mass of apparently homogeneous data to which the mind and the eyes are numb. . . .” The binary “decodes” and “deciphers,” he writes; its technique “presupposes a vast body of raw material or data, following the basic principle of communication theory that the communicational success of a message is in direct proportion to the amount of redundancy it contains.”52 Jameson’s binaries, his data, devices, modes of decoding, and deciphering, as well as Barthes’s stocking reference, to which I earlier referred, all evoke in striking similarity the image of the grid. But this is not just any grid. This grid is a closed system of synchronically occurring oppositional terms.53 To put it as Lucy Lippard did in her catalogue essay to the 1972 exhibition titled Grids Grids Grids Grids . . . , the grid functions as “an arbitrary framework on which to build an entity, a self-restrictive device by which to facilitate choice.”54 Like a net suspended over a void, the grid permits us to picture the absence that functions as the structuring principle and to grasp the idea that all of its terms are fundamentally negative or, as Saussure says, “differences without positive terms.”55 In this light, consider the proliferation of Lévi-Strauss’s diagrams that map exchange among and within families, whether of women or buffalo meat (figs. 1.19a & 1.19b). Indeed his diagrams, much like those that, for example, Mary Kelly mobilized in her PostPartum Document (1973 – 79), point back to the basic tenets of structuralist linguistics. We might say they are the offspring of the father grid. They are the anthropologist’s means of representing McLuhan’s notion of “pattern recognition”— that “breakthrough” that occurs when “the details fall away and the pattern of interrelationships that they provide emerges starkly.”56 Structuralism also asks us to believe that being a subject is an ambivalent state of affairs. On the one hand, structuralists maintain that identity is marked by self-estrangement. In 1972 Fredric Jameson described this condition with the phrase “the prison-house of language,” which he attributes (somewhat wrongly) to Nietzsche.57 However, the flip side to this imprisoned condition is that without self-loss there would be no sociality as such. Structural order is not only our limiting condition, but also the impetus for

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a politics that promises to transform that order.58 In fact, although structuralism looks to be but an abstraction or a “merely theoretical” terrain, it was, arguably, also lived and practiced by many. There’s that famous graffiti left on a blackboard in the Sorbonne by a student in May 1968, which read: “Structures do not walk the streets!” Lacan’s response argued just the opposite: “If there is one thing,” he retorted, “demonstrated by the events of May, it is precisely that structures did take to the streets. The fact that those words were written at the very place where people took to the streets proves nothing other than, simply, that very often, even most often, what is internal to what is called action is that it does not know itself.”59 The structuralist imaginary further helps us to understand why some “informational” art practitioners embraced the idea that imprisonment in an information world might actually be their saving condition — we cannot escape the grid, they thought, but the code can be recombined. Consider one iteration of this idea: Lucy Lippard’s contribution to the Infor-

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1.19 (a & b) Diagram of cross-cousin marriage and diagram of meat distribution among relatives. From Elementary Structures of Kinship, by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Published first in France under the title Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté in 1949. A revised edition was published under the same title in France in 1967. Translation copyright © 1969 by Beacon Press. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.

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mation show, titled “a 1b 2 s 19 e 5n14 t 20 e 5e 5 i 9n14 f 6 o 15r 18 m 13 a 1 t 20 i 9 o 15n14 a 1n14d 4 o 15r 18 c 3r 18 i 9 t 20 i 9 c 3i 9 s 19m 13” and consisting of an eight-page catalogue entry comprised of detailed instructions. Lippard produced the work — itself a series of interrelated moves — by looking up the word “absence” in her dictionary. There, in the crevices of the book, she discovers a lost pair of tickets to a film screening. With that the word “absence”— not the “no-thing” itself, but its signifier — becomes the lost origin, as it were, of Lippard’s invented system. Using the numbers on the recovered ticket stubs she generates her “absentee information” by spawning a game of numerical and alphabetical permutation, combining the elements from the stubs in various ways to dictate the content of the work. This is her “little bit of freedom,” as Lacan would say; it is her “speech act” in what is otherwise an arbitrarily dictated, yet rigid system of meaning.60 But Lippard’s “absentee information” also functions as “criticism.” In the final page of the work, which ultimately takes the form of typewritten information, Lippard spells out specific instructions to McShine to challenge the social order. He must “show no films glorifying war,” she commands, and purchase artworks, again — and this is central to my point — according to some recombination of her code, and then donate them to “independent museums all over the world . . . in low-income areas.” These are the culminating moves in her language game. They are the “work” of her artwork. If we codify a new language of art criticism, she believes, then we might be able to redirect art’s distribution to disenfranchised viewers. If we put pressure on the museum’s patrons to adopt new habits of viewership, we might redirect the ideology of the museum and the institutions with which it allies itself. If we halt the glorification of militarism in its imaginary forms, we may even — or so Lippard hopes — end war altogether. In a similar vein, Jonathan Flatley has read LeWitt’s Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (1974) — that sprawling elaboration of every variation of an open-sided cube missing between one and nine of its edges, rendered in a variety of media and formats — by evocatively suggesting that the 122 cubes in fact achieve likeness, both in spite and by virtue of their obdurate difference (fig. 1.20). For what they share is incompleteness, and, in effect, they comprise what Flatley calls “a melancholy community — they are all missing the same thing, but each in a different specific way.” Flatley’s description further imputes to the forms a profoundly social quality, machinelike indeed, yet it is their “structure of affiliation”— and I would add their

1.20  Sol LeWitt, Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974, painted wood structures, gelatin-silver prints, and drawings on paper; sculptures: 8 × 8 × 8 in., framed works: 26 × 14 in., base: 12 × 120 × 216 in., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund: Gift of Emily L. Carroll and Thomas Weisel, Jean and James E. Douglas Jr., Susan and Robert Green, Evelyn Haas, Mimi and Peter Haas, Eve and Harvey Masonek, Elain McKeon, the Modern Art Council, Phyllis and Stuart G. Moldaw, Christine and Michael Murray, Danielle and Brooks Walker Jr., and Phyllis Wattis. © 2012 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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structural affiliation, the fact that their likeness and difference are predicated on the model of structure — that permits them political expression: The cubes are not alone in their loss; in fact, it is loss that brings them together. Being brought together by what they are missing, they form a kind of diasporic community. This structure of affiliation has the advantage of preserving particularity. It is also a form of affiliation that can easily support collective opposition, and as such it may be especially apt for the present historical moment. It is, for example, what brought the various activists together in the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle. . . . By letting the idea be the “machine that makes the art” LeWitt is able to produce art that helps us to remember not only what it feels like to be aware of the machines that order our everyday lives. Open Cubes also reminds us that the alienation that is an inevitable effect of being part of the machine-assemblage can also be transformed into the basis of affiliation, even collective opposition.61

As for Lippard’s system, her “machine-assemblage” reminds us of that hyperbolic quality that defines many such systems. One could even call her system parodic in its circuitousness, in the way it slips incessantly from one signifier to the next, in the very obsolescence of its complexity, and her own faith in its mode of signification. Lippard’s catalogue entry is parodic even if and as she aspires to make systematicity democratize art and to make art, in turn, change the order of things. The subject of Lippard’s information game is trapped inside its logic, both “running” and “following” at once. No wonder Barthes appositively pairs those verbs in his description of structure. Neither is quite right: “run” is too early, too much ahead of the system, and “follow” is too late — too much run by it. Only together can they do the job of describing the condition of being in a structural system, where there are, as Lippard evinces, “innumerable centres,” to quote Barthes again, and “nothing beneath”; where one’s sense of being and meaning happens laterally, as if across an expansive surface that can be “ranged over,” but never “pierced.”62 Where, in sum, being and meaning are shaped and delimited by the order of the grid.

In the Grid In a 1972 Artforum article, the critic Max Kozloff describes what he calls “the trouble with art-as-idea”— another name for the aesthetic I have been examining here.63 It is all data and no sense. Think Armajani’s paper tower

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of zeros and ones. Perhaps Kozloff’s point is not entirely off the mark. As the critic sees it, this art is not so much telling us something as transmitting the broken bits of a lost message, or inventorying some transaction the details of which are too remote to put back together. Art has been reduced to marks that serve no function other than that of interruption, conclusion, accentuation, indication — but of what, we can hardly say. To all of this, Kozloff laments, the art world readily signs its name. The critical reviews that followed the Information show in the summer of 1970 anticipated Kozloff’s sense of dismay. Just days after its opening, Hilton Kramer declared the show to be “unmitigated nonsense.” “The ‘relevant and meaningful’ thing to do in the face of this grave political crisis is, apparently,” he added, “to . . . go to town with the Xerox machine.”64 “The effect,” described another reviewer, “was the deprived feeling one might experience from reading an excellent musical score but never actually hearing it.”65 Carter Ratcliff defamed the Information show by forecasting that this art will “not lead to a future where anyone will live; this is the art of the death we cultivate around us now.”66 To my mind, the critics mostly mistook how the message was to be read. For — and here is the crux of my point — by signing its name to this picture of things, artists did not so much embrace it, as lay it bare, broach its fictions and its limitations, even as they often risked getting caught in the very systems they adopted to do so. “This is the dream of the information world,” they seem to be telling us. A dream (indeed, a nightmare for many) of the world as a total sign system, where even language has been stripped of affect and pared of everything save the bones of its infrastructure; a dream that sometimes promises revolution, but just as often threatens to dissociate completely cause and effect, sign and referent, subject and world. The dream of the information world is a fantasy about being in and of the grid. Self-restriction; arbitrariness; that disciplined, autonomous, device-like quality of being both “run” and “followed” at once; the proposition of an absolute visibility that defies the very conditions of the phenomenal world; the very unquestionability of the laws that govern the system; and the proposition that “if law is anywhere, it is everywhere”— these are the conditions of the grid.67 There is also its scientistic claim to reason, and its peculiar notion of visibility as all-seeing, immune to opacity, and powered by, to repeat Descartes’s formulation, the “inward vision of [the] mind.”

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Yet this aesthetic often also permits us to see something more than this dream. Indeed, this must have been the case at the Information show. By bringing structural order up against other registers of meaning that don’t fit within its code, that reconceive of the capacities of the grid, the strategies of withholding that produce the dream can give way. Or, to put it as Robert Morris has in another context, one that I return to in chapter 2: “Everywhere the signified assaults and overwhelms the signifier.”68 Note that Morris’s words overturn Saussure’s foundational notion, described by Lacan in the form of an algorithm in which the signifier always stands over the signified (fig. 1.21). Morris, among many others, suggests that the signifier cannot possibly be primary in every order of being. Or, to frame the matter as Robert Smithson did, “[the system] is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Indeed, the very “notion of an establishment,” he elaborates, “is a ‘bad dream’ that has somehow consumed the world.”69 In that bad dream, Smithson maintains in a language that seems to speak precisely of this structuralist imaginary, everything is catalogued within the terms of a “science.” Everything is, to use his word, “leveled.” There, social structures are “fictitious” because they reflect only a “crumbling world-mind.” He suggests that the establishment is not a thing to be fought, revolutionized, or restructured. It is not even a thing to be brought down. It is, moreover, a giant master system of the sociopolitical, an overgrown grid with by now its very own mind that has both sprung from, and wrapped itself around, our own. What’s more, as the contemporaneous work of Mary Kelly permits us to see, that mastermind has not merely wrapped itself around our own; it has also accrued enormous psychic capital. As Kelly’s own feminist and conceptualist commitments can attest, we have come to love the idea of the grid. Its lawful scientism, abstraction, and cerebralism are themselves affective, even as — in fact, precisely because — they endeavor to keep the imaginary and with it the affective at bay. Structuralism has seduced us, symptomatized through us, and gripped us with its promise of a masterful dis-affection. We could look, finally, to Kelly’s reformulation of the Lacanian algorithm included in her Post-Partum Document as a parodic, albeit desperate attempt to informationalize this point: there are indeed signifieds that a structuralist world-mind knows not how to understand (fig. 1.22). Of what world are they? What would a politics predicated on their terms look like? How might we represent and practice them? Look again, one last time, at LeWitt’s Untitled print. Indeed, it is informational. But with respect to our expectations of that term, it is also,

1.21  Jacques Lacan, the Saussurean algorithm, 1966. From Écrits: A Selection, by Jacques Lacan, translated by Alan Sheridan. Copyright © 1966 by Editions du Seuil. English translation copyright © 1977 by Tavistock Publications. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Printed with the permission of Jacques-Alain Miller, custodian of the rights to the work of Jacques Lacan, under French law, March 11, 1957. 1.22  Mary Kelly, detail of Post-Partum Document, “Documentation II: Analyzed Utterances and Related Speech Events,” 1975. Perspex unit, paper, ink, 20 × 25.5 cm. 1 of 26 units, black-and-white photograph. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the artist.

1.23  Sol LeWitt, detail of announcement card for Sol LeWitt exhibition at Dwan Gallery, 1967. Printed announcement, 35.6 × 35.6 cm. © 2012 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York and Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston.

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crudely put, a mess. For, as with Armajani’s paper column, LeWitt’s information cannot help but accede to the tactile and temporal registers of meaning that inhere in his process and materials: the multi-directionality of the paper’s surface, the handwrittenness of his information, the pressure, tempo, and sweep of his inscription that is not accounted for by the signification that his words alone aim to convey — in short, the phenomenal and corporeal realms, and the realm of affect, all of which structuralism would rather have us forget (fig. 1.23). The haptic has found its way into LeWitt’s anti-optic, even as he has worked so hard to secure it and close it down. By noting these qualities of the print, it might seem that I am suggesting that we leave behind the legacy of structuralism and its graveyard of dead authors for the purposes of returning to some age-old romanticized notion of the artist, his touch, and his work. Yet, as I cautioned my reader at the outset of this book, all too familiar and false is this dichotomy between, on the one hand, the radical foreclosure of the human held out by structuralism and, on the other, the divinization of man and his work. Certainly, as François Dosse has suggested, an uncomplicated return to what preceded is neither desirable nor possible. Nonetheless, we must look back again in order, as he puts it, “to better understand this period whose contributions have irrevocably changed our understanding of humankind,” inclusive of the visual arts.70 And so even as the grid has been called upon to “stabilize” and “neutralize” space by treating it “equally,” as LeWitt writes alongside his grid drawing, it is that very inscription that unwittingly brings into visibility that which language and the grid have been conscripted to repress. After all, writing itself is hardly a matter of “treating things equally.” Even LeWitt’s words are undecided about what they have to say and what they have to show. Perhaps LeWitt himself was always much more like Armajani than Haacke. In any case, his print clearly suggests that writing’s forms are not entirely systematic, nor are they in every way “effects” of the signifier or even of representation. We might say that its forms picture a world that is not always-already after words, not ever-dictated by the laws of the grid. But it’s not so much that their world is before words, or just outside of them; to think of the problem that way would be to remain suspended, like the grid, in midair. Rather, the forms that LeWitt shows us in this print exceed the representational capacities of the signifier, even as they have accompanied that system all along.

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2. Turning Around, Turning Away

. . . always the sense of nothingness as the surrounding membrane of existence. Always the question why something instead of nothing, death a millimeter away. Always the desperation to mark this membrane. Art was just therapy of and for the body, one act after the next, just one more reminder that the body was still moving. Insofar as it was capable of moving / marking, it asserted the endless wonder: “Still there!” — Robert Morris (1994)

You are on the street. By chance you meet with an acquaintance. He tips his hat to say hello — he, being a gentleman. You recognize the gesture. And you recognize the man just as he has recognized you. It follows that you would say hello in turn, perhaps raise a hat right back — although Erwin Panofsky’s narrative of this encounter does not go quite so far. For the German art historian, who contrives this very scene in his 1939 essay “Iconography and Iconology,” the street is the setting for an everyday occasion ripe for interpretation, and so he uses it to introduce his iconographical method.1 He takes apart the encounter, separates its information into its various levels: from the purely visual forms that we perceive but that do not signify, to levels of iconographical and iconological meaning that bring to the forms cultural, personal, and technical knowledge. Along the way, Panofsky also presents a picture of the street as a place where individuals behave freely and rationally; their encounters are reasonably and willingly conducted. They are in command of themselves. They are as respectable in their self-presentation as they are respectful of and grounded in tradition. And they see one another as equals — without fear and intimidation.2 Robert Morris had just this street scene in mind when he performed 21.3 at Stage 73 in New York in February 1964. The performance was part

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2.1  Robert Morris, 21.3, 1964. Morris in performance at State 73, Surplus Dance Theater, New York. © Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 2.2 (opposite) Robert Morris, lecture notes for 21.3, 1964. Courtesy of the artist. © Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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of a series of four Monday evenings of dance, organized by Steve Paxton.3 21.3 commenced with the dimming of the lights as Morris, dressed in suit and tie, walked to the center of the stage and stood behind a podium as any art historian would, only instead of delivering a live lecture, he lip-synched his own previously recorded recitation of an excerpt taken from the beginning of Panofsky’s well-known essay (fig. 2.1). Staging himself behind the podium, he began: “When an acquaintance greets me on the street by removing his hat, what I see from a formal point of view is nothing but the change of certain details within a configuration forming part of the general pattern of color, lines and volumes which constitutes my world of vision. . . .” Intermixed with Panofsky’s text, the tape included other superfluous sounds: Morris pouring water, drinking it, moving about, exhaling, and so on. There on the stage, the artist also performed these gestures, each

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in fact premeditated: “right hand on stand,” “fold arms,” “finger in collar,” “slow shift of body left”— he noted to himself in his lecture notes (fig. 2.2). But Morris had carefully choreographed these movements so as to be not so much in, but rather out of sync with the recording — sometimes slightly, almost imperceptibly so: his mouth forming words just a bit too late. At other times, the disjuncture was more pronounced. At the time, Morris, then thirty-three years of age, was teaching at Hunter College in New York City and studying art history at Rutgers. He was little known as an artist; he had moved to New York in 1961 and began to show his work there in 1963 at venues such as the Green Gallery. Before that, Morris spent several years in San Francisco, first painting and drawing in the vein of Jackson Pollock and then becoming increasingly involved in dance, a practice that seemed to compromise his commitment to painting.4 His work with and marriage to Simone Forti in 1954 would lead to the formation of an improvisational theater and dance group in San Francisco in 1957 that resisted traditional dance techniques and instead experimented with “tasks,” “rules,” or other game-like situations. This early experimentation would eventually reemerge as the organizing principle of a large body of drawn work that Morris would begin to produce in 1973, continue for several decades, and call the Blind Time drawings.5 Morris’s early dance and performance work would also have a significant and more immediate afterlife in the early 1960s, when he began producing works after Du­champ. Like his work with performance and Fluxus-style events, in these so-called neo-Dada works — such as Performer Switch (1960), Litanies (1961), Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961), and Card File (1962) — Morris made objects to investigate notions of process, task, automation, and repetition, as well as the activity of, and fading possibility for, self-reflectivity and self-consciousness. By 1964 Morris undoubtedly knew Panofsky’s text well: “Iconography and Iconology” was canonical in the postwar period and likely on many American art history students’ reading lists.6 21.3 in fact refers to the catalogue listing of an art history survey course that Morris taught at Hunter and that must have included Panofsky’s widely read essay.7 Putting Panofsky’s words in Morris’s very own mouth for the Stage 73 performance seemed to suggest Morris’s allegiance to the art historian’s interpretative paradigm. In actuality, the performance interfered with that very possibility, ironizing Morris’s occupation of the position he had come to take up both as an artist and as a student and teacher of art history. For such a po-

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sition was, 21.3 proposed, just that — a position, discursively formed, like a social code (e.g., tipping one’s hat) that, contra Panofsky’s gentleman, one cannot claim as one’s own but may only inhabit, for such positions always precede and exceed us. Indeed, 21.3 made apparent that the acquaintance at the heart of Panofsky’s lecture (a figure offered up as the transparent, incontestable matter of the art historian’s lesson) could not be any more in command of his own gestures than Morris showed himself to be while lecturing. In spite of hat, suit, and tie, neither dignified nor rational were either of these subjects. What may have appeared so was in fact administrated — largely if not entirely determined from without. In 1993, looking back over a quarter century of work, Morris wrote that “if there was a constant” in his art making, “that ‘rotting sack of Humanism’ . . . has always provided a target.”8 In 21.3 Morris had directed his aim precisely at humanism: where perception and signification do not cooperate with one another, the fundamental terms of Panofsky’s lesson become undone. In “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” originally published in 1940 as the introductory chapter to The Meaning of the Humanities, Panofsky characterizes humanism as “not so much a movement as an attitude which can be defined as the conviction of the dignity of man, based on both the insistence on human values (rationality and freedom) and the acceptance of human limitations (fallibility and frailty); from this two postulates result — responsibility and tolerance.”9 Panofsky’s humanist is historically conscious; while he rejects authority, he respects a tradition consisting of human monuments and documents.10 Also in “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” Panofsky recalls Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s “On the Dignity of Man” as an important source for his conception of humanism: “Pico says that God placed man in the center of the universe so that he might be conscious of where he stands, and therefore free to decide ‘where to turn.’ ”11 It is precisely of the freedom to turn, both this way and that, that the antihumanist subject is deprived. He can only turn toward the voice that calls to him; indeed, he must turn in order to appear in the first place. He enjoys neither self-consciousness nor freedom — only the illusion of such things, which serves to propel the system that underwrites and requires that illusion in order to produce and reproduce subjects who naively claim their needs and desires as their own.12 You are on the street again, walking along. Only this time the scenario is different. You are not greeted formally nor by someone you know; rather,

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you are called out to suddenly and from behind. The call is abstract and anonymous. It is unexpected. Little do you know, it is also inevitable and unavoidable — a necessity veiled by the image of happenstance. The call comes as it would from a policeman or other figure of the law: “Hey, you there!” The suspicion that “you” might really mean you quickly gives way to certainty: these words are meant for you, and so you turn around to indicate that you have received them. Your response may feel like an act of choice, but in fact it is the call that chases you, pulling your response from you like a magnet. There is no alternative, really — or so Louis Althusser suggested when he imagined this scene in 1970 as the central, organizing scenario in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.”13 The encounter is not civilized. In fact, you and this voice, this Other, do not share a past at all, as Panofsky’s men do. Though compelled by it, you do not recognize the voice. But the voice knows you, and with such certainty that you cannot hide from the force of its recognition — to do so would be to disappear completely. Unlike Panofsky’s street scenario, Althusser’s serves not as fodder for a hermeneutics, but to narrate the way in which, according to his particular version of Marxist structuralism, human subjects forcibly come to be. For Althusser, this moment of turning around describes the production of the subject. In that “mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion,” he who answers the call is subjected. Thus the freedom of recognition that Panofsky’s acquaintances enjoyed, circa 1940, was not at all available to Althusser’s man on the street by 1970. In fact, Panofsky’s idea of the public sphere and of civil society would fray in the 1960s. In its place, accounts such as that of Althusser suggested that the subject must be first recognized by the law, and only then, by internalizing that power, could he recognize himself as such and be recognized by others.14 Panofsky presumes the pre-existence of the subject in sync with his actions; Althusser insists that who or what precedes the call to become a subject is merely an abstraction and cannot yet, properly speaking, be said to be. There is, then, for Althusser, no subject who merely walks down the street, happening upon and freely greeting others. The subject is only after — after having been hailed, after having turned around, and always, thereafter, beset by the condition of belatedness. One of my aims with this chapter is to foreground Althusser’s turning subject — a move that I promised my readers in the introduction to this

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book. That the occasion to do so also supplies me with the opportunity to zero in on Morris’s repeated return to the figure of a “system” in his artwork of the early 1960s may surprise some readers as much as it surprised this writer when I first imagined it. After all, Morris and Althusser would seem strange bedfellows. We are used to imagining the artist’s work alongside the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in light of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s words on language and the philosophic thought of Donald Davidson or, more classically, George Kubler’s reflections on time and things.15 However, by my lights, Althusser’s street scene was already there in 21.3, intervening in Morris’s rendering of Panofsky’s street scene. The framing of such works as Card File (1962) and the early self-portraits within terms provided by Althusser will first lead me to argue that systems had become for Morris a tool to manage or “administrate,” if you will (as systems are wont to do), the affective experience of the antihumanist subject: belated, alienated, automated, not fully conscious of itself, but always endeavoring to be so nonetheless. Thus affect is an “effect” of so many of Morris’s hyperbolically, parodically closed systems, each of which wrestles with and “interprets the predicament” of the subject after antihumanism — the subject that lives in and by the terms of the system.16 In 1973, when Morris began a practice of drawing with his eyes closed, systems took on a new life that refigured the terms of the early work. Where the body had been represented as repressed, in 1973 it came back in full force. In the latter part of this chapter, where I treat the first and second series of the Blind Time drawings, I focus on the ways in which Morris moves back and forth between the discourse of “effects” and “affects,” between automation and primitivistic touch, between alienation and the purposive gesture of turning away, between the arbitrariness of a task set by a system and something of another order, which Morris calls “the motivated.” To understand all that Morris captures with this term, we need structuralism, in particular the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. Likewise, we need Morris’s drawings to show us — as subjects of structuralism and poststructuralism — a way to retain the terms and gains of those discourses while still being able to recover the indispensable remnants that they left behind. Among the most vital of those remnants is something that Morris calls “the world.”17 For Morris, this “world” is not reducible to arbitrary information, much less to some stagnant figure of “the political”; rather, it shows itself by means of the body, its movements, its affects, and its “motivation.”

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Feeling Administration: Morris’s Early Systems Although it was 1993 when Morris would retrospectively claim antihumanism as the through-line of his practice, one could just as well say that his 1964 mimicry of Panofsky in fact prefigured Althusser by subjecting the terms of art and art history making to the alienation and belatedness that condition the experience of the antihumanist subject. In miming Panofsky, Morris offered an image of both the artist and the art historian as textual to an extreme. Both appear as figures for whom speech and body are merely “effects” of a discursive field that is already there long before the lights come up. Of course, 21.3 is not unusual in this regard. Morris already had produced numerous works of the sort alongside his early minimaltype work, such as Untitled Column (1961), Passageway (1961), and Box for Standing (1961). Such sculptural explorations of the body, movement, and architectural form made Morris’s concurrent interest in Dada look “very alien,” as Donald Judd would say of them.18 But Morris’s critique of subjectivity was already in place as early as 1962 with I-Box, a work literally hinged on the question of whether anybody — or, rather, any body, especially the artist himself, naked and seemingly fully disclosed in his raw corporeality — can truly be said to stand in for the abstract and shifting elocutionary subject, he who calls himself “I” (fig. 2.3). In 1963, with several other ironic self-portraits, Morris elaborated this critique. Self-Portrait (EEG) (1963), for example, is a nearly six-foottall record of the artist’s brain waves, tracked by an electroencephalogram whilst Morris concentrated on himself for the length of time it took for the machine to inscribe lines equal to the artist’s height (fig. 2.4). Synchronize so many “indices”— from the encephalographic mark to a measure of the artist’s body’s length, to his own internal effort to “think about himself”— and what you get is a record-cum-portrait of the artist, the packaged possibility that self-representation and self-consciousness might still be (if only facetiously so) systematized and mechanized. At least that is the dubious premise paraded by the work. For the marks that comprise the portrait cannot, of course, be read according to any of the systems of representation in play. Morris’s neo-Dadaist inclinations became the platform for a critique of conventional notions of artistic authorship and subjectivity as well as a site where the related figures of automation, repetition, process, and rulebound behavior could be interrogated as they were being experimented

2.3  Robert Morris, I-Box, 1962. Mixed media, 19 × 12 ½ × 1 ¾ in. Courtesy of Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. © Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

2.4  Robert Morris, SelfPortrait (EEG), 1963. Electroencephalogram and lead labels, framed with metal and glass in 1994, 76 × 21 : in. Courtesy of Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. © Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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with. As W. J. T. Mitchell puts it: “Morris couples . . . the abstract formalist tradition with the relentless, corrosive irony of Duchamp to produce a ‘rational,’ or at least ‘systematic,’ art that aims at perfect lucidity about the possibility that art and history (not to mention art history) might be nightmares from which we can never awake.”19 Indeed, it is “reason,” or some species thereof, that Morris sets to work time and again. Take Card File (1962), for instance (figs. 2.5 and 2.6). Comprised of a flat file of index cards mounted on a wood panel, the object endeavors to be a “complete” catalogue of every aspect involved in the work’s conception and production. “Accidents,” “Categories,” “Completion,” “Conception,” “Consideration,” “Cross Filing,” “Interruptions,” “Losses,” “Mistakes,” and “Owners” are among the forty-four headings typed under plastic filing tabs. These signify the object’s attempt — parodic though it may be — to systematize its own narrative of origins by organizing that information according to the arbitrary order of the alphabet. Indeed, everything looks to be in place. It even feels so due to the disaffected administrative feeling that veils the work. Yet if Card File is “perfectly lucid,” as Mitchell would have it, what then does it make clear? Card File purports to offer a view of nothing other than itself as if seen from above or without, as filing systems are meant to do. Yet is it not also the case that the system that affords this lucid vantage is at the same time the very one in which the object finds itself irrevocably mired: the prison house of its obsessively self-referential being? Although management is the object’s only reason for being, it is palpably clear that were Card File to get hold completely of the irrationality and elisions that have guided its becoming, we would then have nothing but an empty object: pure discourse about itself. Thus the mastery of Card File’s vision is both produced and undercut by the circularity of this raison d’être, which, finally, says as much about the object’s purview and condition as it does of the affective experience we can imagine for it. What does it feel like to be so wide-eyed and clear amidst this interminable dream of self-reference, this insistent effort to administrate one’s own existence? In Card File, as elsewhere, Morris conveys something of this affective life by means of irony — the most defensive, evasive, and playful, yet also self-protective and detached trope. In the introduction to this book, I elaborated structuralism’s particular investment in systems and structure and recounted how this investment grew out of the work of Ferdinand de Saussure in the early part of the century and Claude Lévi-Strauss in the late 1940s, among many others,

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2.5  Robert Morris, Card File, 1962. Metal and plastic wall file mounted on wood, containing fortyfour index cards, 27 × 10 ½ × 2 in. (68.6 × 26.7 × 5.1 cm). Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. © Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

2.6  Robert Morris, details of Card File, 1962. Metal and plastic wall file mounted on wood, containing fortyfour index cards, 27 × 10 ½ × 2 in. (68.6 × 26.7 × 5.1 cm). Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. © Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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and then came to a certain sort of peak by 1966 in the United States with the convening of the international symposium at Johns Hopkins called The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. It was there that Derrida formulated a notion of the structuralist moment as “that in which language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse . . . that is to say, when everything became a system.”20 In his description of Morris’s “systematic art,” Mitchell’s invocation of James Joyce’s famous formulation “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” recalls the fact that, for many, this moment when “everything became a system” was itself quite totalizing, even as it pushed aside the “nightmare” of historicism as well as many other myths. In fact, Mitchell’s comment about Morris could be said to echo not so much Joyce’s Dedalus as Robert Smithson, Morris’s close friend and contemporary. For Smithson, not history, nor art (nor art history), but the “establishment”— an entity he likens to an “invisible system”— was “the nightmare from which [he was] trying to awake.” I referred to this essay, titled “The Establishment” and written in 1968, in chapter 1. Recalling it here underscores its relevance specifically with respect to affective experience in a systematic world. It was in the context of an Italian publication, titled “La sfida del sistema” (“The Challenge of the System”), that the question of systems was put to a number of artists, including Smithson: question: Can the present language of artistic research in the United States be said to contest the system? In which way and to what extent? Considering the present ideological situation (political, aesthetic, social) is it possible for the function of art to occur to its full extent and not be compromised by the establishment even though it may be in opposition to it? Or can the hypothesis of a revolutionary outlet as being the vital condition of art outside and against the establishment, be verified in a symptomatic situation in the United States?21

For Smithson, the very notion of a purely discursive world — absent a center yet totalizing in its reach — is itself the “ ‘bad dream’ that has somehow consumed the world.” In this nightmare, Smithson, like Derrida, sees systems subtending everything. Only for Smithson, this systematic world is illusory and totalizing not in fact, but only in the effects of its fantasy. Although the artist does not label this fantasy “structuralist” per se, it is crystal clear that structurality is at work: for “networks of paths go in all directions”; “this nightmarish system catalogues every known physical thing according to

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[a] science.” For Smithson, this systematic world picture is but a “political dream world,” filled with “crack pot” “‘activist’ demonstrations” where all is “leveled” as much by all the talk of overturning the establishment as by any other systems discourse.22 Smithson’s early death left Morris, he once reported to Rosalind Krauss, with no “fellow anti-humanists to talk to.”23 In spite of their professed allegiances, the artists’ investments in the discourses of systems and structures were distinct. I return to consider Smithson’s work in the following chapter. For now, let’s just say that while Smithson snubs the spaces and positions that a structural system presumes — “outside,” “within,” “for,” or “against” (all in play in the Italian questionnaire) — Morris’s experimentation with systems in the early 1960s, on the other hand, is manneristic: not “rational” or “systematic” in a genuine way; rather, his is an artificial or stylistic embrace of systems rhetorics, one that purposes the discourse at a reserved distance. I want, then, to claim here that Morris recruited systems and rationalisms in the early 1960s not to represent, but to fail to represent both the object and the subject (including the artist himself) of systems. And, further, I want to claim that such failures came cloaked in a peculiar sort of pleasure derived from the contradictions of irony. As in the case of Panofsky ever out of sync with himself, it is this failure that makes Morris’s self-proclaimed antihumanism apparent. But more significantly still, systems and rationalisms in this work also serve the important purpose of managing or “administrating” (to use the notion Benjamin Buchloh, following Theodor Adorno, brought new life to) the affective experience of unrepresentability over and against the earnestness of rational systems to endeavor nonetheless.24 (One might even go so far as to say that Buchloh’s recruitment of the figure of administration is itself an effort to manage the affective quality of the works of art he discusses, a quality that his polemic resolutely disavows.) But affect can’t really be kept down, although it does get relegated to the spaces that our discourses don’t attend to, “the gaps between positions on the grid,” as Brian Massumi puts it: “a theoretical no-body’s land.”25 “No-body” because the body, itself a site of affect, is also systematically consigned to the gaps. The body is in fact quite absent even in Self-Portrait (EEG), despite so many claims to have been produced by it. All we get are arbitrary marks. The same could be said of 21.3: the bodies of both men — the one who tips his hat and the one who gesticulates live before us — have been hollowed out, reduced to effects of discourse.

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In Morris’s early systems, the affective dimension of the work of art produces a space beyond the “nightmare” of the system where more pleasurable affects can be made available. I say “pleasure,” because if one looks across so many of the works in question — the self-portraits, Card File, and so on — one begins to feel a sinister sense of pleasure generated by the “corrosively ironic” clarity about how totalizing this or that system feels and how utterly preconditioned our discursive networks are. It is not so much terror, then, as self-satisfaction, even delight, that follows from having seen the light. And all of this comes in spite of the fact of eminent unknowability — a quality that Card File knows all too well but works systematically to suppress, along with the feeling that accompanies it. This, then, I want to suggest, must have been a reason to produce failed systems in the first place: to generate affect, that non-sign that does not “signify,” properly speaking, but rather “render[s] visible different registers of a problem (formal, ideological, sociohistorical) [and] conjoin[s] these problems in a distinctive manner,” as the literary and cultural theorist Sianne Ngai explains.26 One could say that this particular pleasurable affect is a side effect of Morris’s proto-conceptual works; it arises as if from the margins and for the relief of the viewer alone, leaving the subject of the work itself trapped (like Morris’s Panofsky) inside its system. And it is in the margins (or at least in a space that does not attract the attention of our critical faculties) where affect remains a “murky amalgam” that exceeds the work’s primary elements.27 Citing Morris’s 21.3 as a prototype for more recent so-called “para-performative” practices such as the German art collective called the Jackson Pollock Bar, Matthew Jackson notes precisely this affective effect. “At the conclusion of [such] event[s], the viewer is left with the uncanny (and immensely satisfying) feeling of having watched the art world performed, rather than having watched yet another performance in the art world.”28 Apropos of my point, Jackson’s parenthetical suppression of “satisfaction” suggests that this effect is either not wholly of the work, or perhaps comes veiled in another, more uncomfortable affect that suppresses our satisfaction, such as shame. Like Morris, the members of the Jackson Pollock Bar arrange themselves as a panel of discussants who lipsynch to prerecorded tracks of voices and other surrounding sound effects. The satisfaction is “immense,” notes the historian, though under wraps, he indicates paratextually. Pleasure, immense satisfaction, “a good time”— call it what you will. What I want to propose, moreover, is that it is this affect that qualifies

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our experience of an idea that organizes every work of art of this vein, an idea that Morris no doubt adapted from Duchamp before him: that we are no longer in the world we thought we were; we are, rather, just beyond or outside of it, “watching” from where we can see everything, where all (one could say with Mitchell) is perfectly, systematically lucid.29 Étienne Balibar gives us a term to describe this orientation: immanent externality. In a description of structuralism’s philosophical style, he derives this term from the term “immanent critique,” itself derived from Hegel, Marx, and Adorno, and observes that “structuralism presents itself, in a particularly coherent and radical way, as a practice of immanent externality (a ‘thought of the outside,’ as Foucault put it). . . .”30 What is immanent (or arising from within) is the proposition that we might move beyond interiority, beyond the closed system. And although Balibar does not suggest as much, I would argue that instead of emancipatory social change — the aim of immanent critique — immanent externality, as a philosophical style, gives access to a paradiscursive space of affect, much like the one that we are made to inhabit in 21.3, Card File, and other works of the same vein. In that light, one might further align “immanent externality” with Roland Barthes’s infamous “euphoric dream of scientificity,” by means of which he described his own early love affair with structuralism, which has left us such texts as The Fashion System and Elements of Semiology as its residue. This dream must also have been pleasurable. For the epistemological claims of the scientific mode likewise purport to provide the wholly objective view, and with that view, a space for feeling — perhaps outside of, perhaps beyond, most certainly in spite of the system.31 Morris’s position and aesthetic style would transform over the years to come as he continued to interrogate figures of and claims about systems and structures. To write an exhaustive history of this transformation is not my aim, but it is worth recalling Morris’s more overtly “political” activities in the spring of 1970 because this historical moment has rendered and in many ways calcified particular figurations of the “system” and its “structures” around a notion of “the political,” often to the effect of obscuring the ways in which affectivity subtends those terms as well as our enduring interpretations of them. At this time, the very same figures and claims that we saw the artist working through in the early 1960s had become quite heavily determined with the matter of the power and problems of the “art system” and “art structure.”32 Art historians of Morris’s work in this period

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2.7  Robert Morris on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum during the May 22, 1970, New York Art Strike Against Racism, War, and Repression. Photograph © Jan van Raay.

tell the story like so: Circumstances surrounding the Vietnam War, in particular the Cambodian offensive and the killing of four student protesters at Kent State University, as well as the large-scale protests of the period, arguably occasioned Morris’s shift away from an ironic tone and toward a much more sincere belief in the idea that everything had indeed become a system with particular emphasis at this time on the vividly nightmarish and totalizing ones of “racism, war, and repression”— as the New York Art Strike would list them.33 Morris’s leadership as chairman of Art Strike, an organization that came into being as an effort to launch antiwar actions from within the art world, is perhaps the most overt representation of his conviction that the “values,” “policies,” “presumptions,” “hierarchies,” and

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“modes of control” of the “art structure” were pervasive, powerful, and therefore had to be addressed in turn (fig. 2.7). And so it was on May 17, 1970, that Morris abruptly closed his solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum two weeks ahead of schedule. He urged artists to do their share to “undermine the corrupt system” by boycotting large corporation-sponsored art and government-financed exhibitions, and he called for galleries and museums to make available their ground floors as centers of political propaganda against the war, and for the sale of every artwork to generate a tithe dedicated to a fund for peace activities.34 The many photographs depicting Morris commanding crowds of followers in their opposition to the institution of art serve to fix, yet further, this image of Morris as the “indefatigable art theorist” turned radical who found himself rising up from within the system and marching in step to Herbert Marcuse’s notion of the “Great Refusal,” or “the negation of the entire Establishment.”35 My point here is not to recount in an effort to solidify this familiar historicization of Morris and his thinking about “the System,” but rather to interject into the story a new claim about the function of affect for it. With affect in mind, we open up not just our interpretation of this important artist’s work, but also the very notions of “the political” and “the ideological” that come hitched to the figure of the System. For what is it if not affect — our collective experience of it — that enables “ideological relations to be internalized and, consequently, naturalized,” just as they were for Morris and so many others in the spring of 1970?36 Likewise, is it not affect — in particular, its economies of distribution, that is, where and to what extent we invest it — that has allowed systems, more abstractly conceived, to be reduced to the more monolithic notion of “the System,” which has become, in effect, more visible than other renderings of systems in the historicization of Morris’s work? It follows, then, that affect is the substance or signifying register that has kept us — historians of Robert Morris’s systems, and historians of systems discourse of various sorts — from bringing structuralism to bear upon our understanding of this rendering and others like it. As Lawrence Grossberg submits, affect is what underwrites “the power of the articulation which bonds particular representations and realities.” Without affect, no ideological system — including the interpretive — can hold.37 In other words, the integrity of an ideological system, or, as Mikel Dufrenne writes in different but closely related terms, “the unity of a Weltanschauung,” finds its coherence in “the coherence of a character-

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istic or quality.”38 That is to say, the world holds together in or as a picture (organized in such a way so as to be viewed) only by virtue of the fact that a particular feeling comes through loudly, clearly, and with many bodies registering it, in unison.

Motivation, Movement, Affect It is no mere coincidence that the central interpellatory gesture of Althusser’s story of subjection is one of turning around while, inversely, over the course of the twentieth century, artists have become increasingly invested in gestures of turning away — from “art,” its processes, and making itself. These gestures, I want to claim, are closely related. For when in the moment, described by Althusser, that the individual turns around, by the necessity of that gesture he also turns away. This is to say that subjection (the willing submission to the recognition of the law in which the subject also comes to recognize himself as such by internalizing that power) embraces or turns toward, if you will, the very fact of dispossession, of being turned away. But from what does the subject turn away? From the humanist understanding of freedom; from the essentialist paradigm and the discourse of substance; and from so many other “myths,” including those that the art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss would take on when constructing her 1985 book, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, to which I return in chapter 3.39 It was also in April 1970, just as Morris was deepening his involvement in antiwar activities, when he published an essay in Artforum that would articulate in no uncertain terms and expand upon in his usual philosophically minded manner his own investment in turning away. This essay, titled “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated,” extends Morris’s sustained concern with systems by bringing to it something of the phenomenological concerns represented in the first three parts of his “Notes on Sculpture” series and the essay titled “Antiform,” written between the years 1966 and 1968. In “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making,” Morris set out to distinguish between two kinds of systems: on the one hand, there are those that precede the work, which run from Duchamp and Cage “down through the logical systems of Johns and Stella,” and which, Morris suggests, have left us at a dead end with “the totally physically paralyzed conclusions of Conceptual art.” Morris calls these systems “a priori,” “Idealist-oriented,” and derived from

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“mental logic.” Total physical paralysis is his critical point here; Morris’s prior mobilizations of systems had devolved into a paralysis of their own (making his remark as self-critical as it was of anything else.) Some notion of movement would have to remain at work within the alternative type of system that Morris aimed to formulate in 1970 and “search for” in his practice — even as he orientated himself away, seeking while blinded, so to speak. Morris seized upon the term “motivated” in an effort to theorize this notion of movement. In fact, he never overtly speaks of movement per se. In the “system-seeking art making” that Morris had in mind, motivation was intrinsic to the “‘tendencies’ inherent in a materials / process interaction.”40 In speaking of movement, there is much truth to claims about Morris’s investment in phenomenology, particularly of the sort developed by the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which have been recruited to elaborate an account about the centrality of the body and its movements in Morris’s minimalist practice, as well as the ethic of viewership that practice arguably set up. In “The Theory of the Body Is Already a Theory of Perception,” from Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 magnum opus, Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues for the restoration of the object to bodily experience. His oft-cited example, fitting for Morris’s minimalism, is the cube. Pondering how it is that we perceive the cube and just what it is that comprises its object form, Merleau-Ponty writes: “But can the object be thus detached from the actual conditions under which it is presented to us? One can bring together discursively the notion of the number six, the notion of ‘side’ and that of equality, and link them together in a formula which is the definition of the cube. But this definition rather puts a question to us than offers us something to conceive.”41 Unlike definitions and discursive formulations, perception, the phenomenologist argues, is shaped by the effects of both delay and partiality, transparency and opacity, surface and depth, exposure and hiddenness — as occurs with the flutter of the eyelids, the movement of the eyes, the momentary eclipse and torsion of things those movements seem to induce.42 Thus, Merleau-Ponty infers: “One emerges from blind, symbolic thought only by perceiving the particular spatial entity which bears these predicates all together.”43 It would be repetitive to detail the phenomenological read any further, even if one could do so with more exact attention to Merleau-Ponty’s terms than most histories of art are inclined. For, as complicated as Merleau­ Ponty’s phenomenology is, the phenomenological read of Morris is, it

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seems to me, still too easy to explain in full such things as the artist’s struggle against “total physical paralysis” or his related “search for the motivated,” not to mention the larger history of systems- and processoriented work to which his practice belongs. In fact, in “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making,” Morris turns not to Maurice MerleauPonty but to Ferdinand de Saussure, whose remarks help him, rhetorically speaking, tease out an alternative to “a priori” systems that are, worst of all, claims Morris, highly predicated on the “arbitrary.” “Arbitrary,” we must remember, is the adjective at the very heart of the first and most enigmatic principle in Saussure’s 1916 polemic about language. “No one disputes the principle of the arbitrary nature of the sign,” Saussure attests, referring only in the most immediate sense to the fact that there is no natural, inevitable, or substantial relationship between a signifier and a signified.44 “The hierarchical place of this truth is at the very summit. It is only little by little that one recognizes how many different facts are but ramifications, hidden consequences of this truth.”45 With regard to the arbitrary, Duchamp’s Trois Stoppages étalons (1913 – 14) appears in the pages of “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making” alongside a detail of the stonework from Machu Picchu, another from Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes (c. 1460), and a photograph of Jackson Pollock lunging as he splatters paint onto a canvas that in 1950 became known as #32. Three Standard Stoppages is not only a contemporary of Saussure’s Course; it also challenges the legal and scientific authority of the standard meter precisely by calling attention to its arbitrary nature (fig. 2.8). It is comprised of three radically unequal meter sticks and their templates, three separate meter-long lines of string, each with a distinctive curving profile that was determined by chance when Duchamp allowed the strings to fall freely from the height of one meter. Established as the distance between two points scratched onto the surface of a platinum-iridium bar, the standard meter is housed in a temperature-controlled chamber maintained by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in the Pavillon de Breteuil in Sèvres, a suburb of Paris. Similar to Marx’s general equivalent, the standard is alone charged with the job of producing equivalences in the system of representation it presides over.46 However, Duchamp’s “standards”— of which there are ironically not one but three — are unequivalently equivalent. As such, they nag and taunt their arbiter, laughing (in a tone that Morris would conjure again half a century later in works like Self-Portrait (EEG) or any of the various ruler

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2.8  Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), 3 Standard Stoppages. Paris, 1913–14. Wood box 11 1⁄8 × 50 7⁄8 × 9 in. (28.2 × 129.2 × 22.7 cm), with three threads 39 3⁄8 in. (100 cm), glued to three painted canvas strips 5 ¼ × 47 ¼ in. (13.3 × 120 cm), each mounted on a glass panel 7 ¼ × 49 3⁄8 × ¼ in. (18.4 × 125.4 × 0.6 cm), three wood slats 2 ½ × 43 × ⁄ 1 8 in. (6.2 × 109.2 × 0.2 cm), shaped along one edge to match the curves of the threads. Katherine S. Dreier Bequest. The Museum of Modern Art, New York NY, U.S.A. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / A DAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

works he produced between 1963 and 1964) as they give away the secret: it is quite literally something of a nothing that regulates our uncontested laws of value. There is no natural, inevitable, or substantial relationship between the “standard” and the distance it represents. The relationship is arbitrary. As Saussure famously puts it: “. . . in language there are only differences. . . . [A] difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms.”47 The standard thus wields its power as a structuring absence, being, in effect, not there, or “hermetically sealed,” as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein would say — yanked out of circulation so that it

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may take its governing place in the hegemony. What’s more: its adherence to the rule of measurement we can neither refute nor confirm, for it is at the discretion, in fact the whim (for there is no motivation for the particularity of its rule), of the law — the very law it underwrites. Therein lies the power of its “peculiar role.” In his 1921 text Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein expands upon this point: There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris. — But this is, of course, not to ascribe any extraordinary property to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the language-game of measuring with a metre-rule.48

Of course, the “peculiar role” played by the standard is precisely extraordinary because it is at once utterly replaceable and utterly irrefutable. It keeps us silent — a fact that further informs and facilitates our understanding of what it meant for Morris to march on the “art system” and “art structure,” just as he was publishing this essay. Marching was an effort to break that silence, to shake the system — an activity that Duchamp reproduces with irony and wit. The principle of the arbitrary is derived from the figure of the arbiter (whose fifteenth-century Latin roots convey the sense of a judge or umpire), and it demands, in the recognition that it requires from us, that we turn around to heed its call — capricious, discretionary, and whimsical though it may be.49 The term “motivated” is derived from the Middle Latin motivus, meaning “impelling or moving,” which in turn is derived from the Latin word motus, a form of the verb movere, meaning “to move,” and is the root word in the formation of the English word “motive”: something that inwardly moves someone to act or behave in a particular way.50 When Saussure speaks of a signifier as “motivated,” he means that it retains the “rudiment of a natural bond” between it and the signified. “The symbol of justice, a pair of scales, could not be replaced by just any other symbol, such as a chariot.”51 But one could also say, more tellingly and with regard to Morris’s concern with movement, that the signifier has been moved, as if from within, by the thing it represents. In the introduction to this book, I began to historicize these aspects of this figure as it appears not in the guise of motivation or movement per se, but in related forms within the subjectivism of the humanist emphasis on

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creativity, freedom, and purpose. This figure, in the variety of forms it has taken, came under attack by structuralists, who developed as its antidote a purportedly objective and scientific study of the structures underlying innumerable social and cultural phenomena. Importantly, this antidote has made it possible for us, as I earlier noted, to think of identity categories and their signifiers as determined not by some essential or substantial quality (i.e., as motivated), but by a particular notion of difference adjudicated by the play of arbitrary signifiers in a closed system, which, in turn, produces “effects,” the most important of which is the subject itself. Motivation, then — and the notion of movement that inheres in it — raises specters of a profoundly subjectivist, unscientific, and unsystematic perspective, and would seem to open itself up to the usual criticisms: that “the ‘humanist’ interpretation views the past as developing towards the present whose ‘consciousness’ is projected back upon [that past]; [that he] views the ‘primitive’ from the standpoint of its own ‘civilization,’ ” and projects his own consciousness back upon the primitive; and so on.52 Likewise, the humanist views the relationship between the artist, his hand, his touch, and his work as representative of, in fact belonging to (as if motivated by) his or her biography, intention, being, or will. As the French intellectual historian François Dosse portends whenever specters of motivation draw near: “The old sawhorses are back: the discreet charms of a Vidalian landscape, the heroes of Lavissian history, the masterpieces of the national literary patrimony in Lagarde and Michard. Beyond this return to a very particular nineteenth century,” he elaborates, “is a particular eighteenth-century vision of man perceived as an abstraction, free from temporal constraints and master of the legal-political system bodying forth his rationalism.”53 In a particularly uncanny passage referring to the automation of artistic production, Morris writes: “It would seem that the artist is here turned away. . . .”54 I want to argue that Morris’s search for the motivated is of a piece with so many gestures of turning away — like Duchamp releasing strings into the air, but at a very different moment in history and with a very different charge. But, to be clear, turning away is not the same thing as turning back or returning, in the sense that Dosse intends when he conjures the phantoms of an earlier worldview, although in Morris’s work of the sort in which the motivated is being sought certainly the appearance of a primitive gesture is at work. I’m thinking here specifically of the Blind Time drawings, which he produced, hundreds of them all told, over nearly forty

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years, beginning three years after he wrote the essay on the motivated (fig. 2.9). These drawings are the focus of the following pages. In them we see what remains after the artist has mucked around on his working surface with powdered medium on his bare and groping hands, depositing traces as his hands move this way and that — searching, feeling, and touching in a manner that is not unlike the way in which Mary Kelly would search, feel, and touch in Antepartum the very same year. Like Kelly’s touch, Morris’s is blind. He has shut his eyes so as to bracket the effect of vision within the making process. Darkness and touch are brought together, then, in a way that flirts with notions of the unintelligible, the hic et nunc, the unconscious, child-like, and the beautiful — all at once. With these descriptors in play, in what way is drawing in blind time anything other than so many gestures of return? Instead of pursuing this well-worn path, I want to read Morris’s gestures of turning away in light of antihumanism’s effects and affects, and to see his “search” as a renegotiation of the act of turning; one that does not grasp but rather gropes along as if in the dark, looking by not looking for the thing Morris calls the “motivated.” “Motivation” not only brings back structuralism’s investment in a theory of meaning as arbitrarily produced value; it is also loosely suggestive of the concept of affect developed by Freud in the 1890s as a “moving quantity”: a quota or sum whose distinctive characteristic is the ability to transform, or move. Later Freud would elaborate this idea when writing about the forms and figures that comprise a dream, wherein affect, in effect, migrates.55 Moreover, to summon or even chase down specters of return would be a form of neo-primitivism in its own right, in the sense that Victor Li has given that term. That polemic would amount to little more than a projection required to keep the structuralist paradigm in place. By “neo-primitive,” Li means “the conceptual move” or “theoretical option” that “forwards a concept of the primitive so pure that no empirical referent . . . can contradict or refute it”— much in the way that for those deeply committed to structuralist and poststructuralist modes of criticality, the reexamination of the discourses has been foreclosed as a theoretical option, and the anxiety about the return to essentialism, compulsory to say the least.56 As it turns out, the chronopolitics of structuralism suggests as much as the discourse itself. That is to say, it is not just “convenient and clear,” as Althusser openly claimed of his “little theoretical theatre,” that the theory of the antihumanist subject is told in a temporal succession in which he is figured as “always-already,” such that whatever

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2.9  (opposite) Robert Morris, Blind Time X, 1973. Graphite on paper, 46 × 35 in. (117 × 89 cm). Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery, New York. © Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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came beforehand is made to fall completely into darkness.57 It is also and, in effect, neo-primitivistic and neo-essentialistic that Althusser’s account of the subject necessitates such occlusions. Thus, the first thing that Morris’s blind hand marks make visible for us are our own habits of thought.

Drawing Systems In 1973 Robert Morris began drawing with bare hands and closed eyes. For each drawing, he formulated a series of tasks and then followed his own mandate until the activity of drawing was complete: Working with eyes closed and using touching, rubbing, and stroking as 3 methods of marking passed time, the 2 hands begin at left center in the attempt to rub in the rectangle with increasing pressure proportional to the distance from the left. . . . At estimated 5 second intervals, the left hand marks 5 strokes below, at 10 sec. intervals, the hands attempt to make 10 touches in the rectangle above.

Following this directive, Morris produced a drawing (fig. 2.10). We know this because the artist tells us so. Just below the drawing space, he has penciled his directions to himself in a steady hand. To this inscription he adds his “time estimation error”: the difference between clocked time and the length of time he guesses he has spent drawing. Like the draughtsman, time is also blind. Every drawing — all three hundred – plus of them, which Morris produced in seven series over the subsequent four decades — is titled Blind Time.58 In this first series, Morris’s process always observes the same sort of rule, more or less: with powdered graphite on his hands, he blindly draws on a three-by-four-foot sheet of paper — just large enough to accommodate the range of mobility of his forearms. Looking at any Blind Time drawing, we can almost picture Morris with his back to us as he marks up the page. We can nearly track the movement of his hands against the parameters of the paper’s surface: upward or downward, to the right or to the left, diagonally, with an inward or outward motion, in proportion to any number of positions or axes of the paper, and with varying degrees of pressure applied. The body gropes in the dark, makes contact here and there, marks time and space along the tangible edge that the world offers to it. Each drawing tells us something of what the artist has been doing: pushing across the paper, his hands stroke, smudge, press, pull, rub, and tap (fig. 2.11).

2.10  Robert Morris, Blind Time, 1973. Powdered graphite and pencil on paper, 35 × 46 in. (89 × 117 cm). Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery, New York. © Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 2.11  Robert Morris, detail of Blind Time X, 1973. Graphite on paper, 46 × 35 in. (117 × 89 cm). Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery, New York. © Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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This haptical and de-skilled mode of marking has pushed language to the margins of the page. There a dwarfed yet scrupulously penciled text clarifies the performance of the marks by revealing a systems of sorts — one that has catalyzed Morris’s activity. At the foot of a 1973 drawing, one of ninety-eight produced that year, the legend reads as follows (fig. 2.12): With eyes closed, graphite on the hands, and estimating a lapsed time of 3 minutes, both hands attempt to descend the page with identical touching motions in an effort to keep to an even vertical column of touches. time estimation error: +8 seconds.

As Morris touches his way down the surface of the paper, his hands move quickly at first, then they travel more cautiously, retouching the same area, rendering a dark brush of overlapping fingerprints. As the columns of right- and left-handed markings drop, they fall evenly at first. And then, unwittingly, they shift slowly, slightly to one side. Here the hands have not been asked to cooperate, at least not as they would in the blind activity of typing, wherein each hand “knows” the time of each letter and plays a different part in the making of a patterned sense. This drawing asks the hand to become “identical” with its partner such that at any given moment each endeavors to inhabit the very motion and sensation of its opposite. Were Morris to undertake this very task again and again — not unimaginable as repetition is very much a piece of this project — would his fingers eventually learn to “make” identity just as one learns to type a page without error? This question is an important one, not for its anticipated answer but because it exposes the means by which these drawings press us to consider it in the first place: task, repetition, drawing, and writing. These terms belong not just to blind drawing; they are also the daily bread of our practices of social inscription, familiar, as Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document would begin to address that very same year, from the socializing space of school, where entering the social order follows from the basic repetitive disciplining of the hand, its movement away from graphic scrawl toward the ordered geometries of written form.59 In learning to write, we learn to belong to and participate in a public mode of inscription, to subordinate the gestures of the hand to the measured and mathematical means of writing and its economic and systematized vocabulary of forms — triangles, half circles, lines, the rudiments of every letter of our

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modern Roman alphabet. This learning happens through repetition and a kind of coordination, even subordination — the disciplining of the eye and the body together. Only then, we could say, has the child turned around. To these first terms, Morris adds three more: the hands, vision, and blindness. The disciplining of expression is localized at the site of the hand; the hand, in turn, comes to stand in for the subject. In every drawing, the text is penned at the peripheries with the care of a school boy learning to keep his writing straight and evenly spaced between the ruled lines (fig. 2.13). In this pairing, language’s structuring absence becomes palpably vacant — like a giant void that buoys the tiny leaden words in the corner of the page. Could it be that the blind marks are meant to speak of the void, to render the remnants that have been relegated to it by relying

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2.12  Robert Morris, Blind Time I, 1973. Graphite and plate oil on paper, 36 × 46 in. (91.44 × 116.84 cm). Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery, New York. © Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

2.13  Robert Morris, detail of Blind Time I, 1973. Graphite and plate oil on paper, 36 × 46 in. (91.44 × 116.84 cm). Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery, New York. © Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 2.14  Robert Morris, Blind Time V, 1999. Ink on Mylar, 27 ½ × 30 in. (69.85 × 76.2 cm). Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery, New York. © Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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upon the body to describe them — much in the way that the body could be said to describe a lived memory? This is the very task that Morris would decades later set for himself when producing the fifth series, Blind Time V: Melancholia (1999). One such drawing reads (fig. 2.14): Working blindfolded with ink on the hands, estimating the lapsed time, and remembering the time of my father’s dying, I begin at the bottom of the page pressing upward with the strength I remember exerting in lifting his frail body from the bedroom floor where he had fallen. Then in the upper left I mark out a rectangle, remembering his struggling, inarticulate attempt to ask for the shade to be drawn against the hot afternoon sun. Finally, in the estimated empty space I make forty short marks for the forty live oaks that surrounded the house on that searing, humid, Missouri August afternoon. Time estimation error: 0.

As was the case in 1999, in the corner of each 1973 drawing, the effort Morris makes as he draws is described in language. But in 1973, each drawing’s text seems to belong to no one — an acephalic subject, headless, bodiless, except for the hands. Evacuating the first-person pronoun from these texts, Morris writes only of “the hands,” reminding us that they are the critical corporeal site, second only to the mouth, for the subject’s entry into language and the body’s turn toward gestures of public discourse. Drawing after drawing, the “hands” are nominally present in each and every marginal text. “The hands begin . . .” “The left hand applies . . .” “The right hand follows . . .” And always: “The hands work . . .” The speaking subject is, on the other hand, absent from them. Those disconnected hands remind us of what it is to be a subject of the structural order. They recall the fateful moment when the subject, having entered language, is “produced by the signifier” and, at once, “fades” away, as if having stepped into an empty box, equipped with a mechanism of occlusion.60 However, unless the eye is schooled along with the hand, the subject cannot be brought into line. Before the written word, the meaning of the child’s undisciplined, handmade mark inheres in the direction of its stroke, the pressure applied, its tempo and sweep. It is not the eye but bodily sensations — muscular, tonic, and plastic — that guide those early marks. At its very origin, then, graphic expression is blind.61 This gesture of “recalling and repeating” was reiterated time and again in the drawings that first year (fig. 2.15).

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2.15  Robert Morris, Blind Time, 1973. Powdered graphite and pencil on paper, 35 × 46  ⁄ 1 8 in. (89 × 117 cm). Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery, New York. © Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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500 rubbing strokes are made in an area on the left within a 50" timed period. Then with the eyes closed and using the held breath as a gauge for 50" an attempt is made to recall and repeat the motions of the right side. Time estimation error: −3".

What I want to claim about Morris’s de-skilling repetitions is that they constitute precisely a form of turning away. Or, to stay with the interpellatory scene of writing, they endeavor to turn back the school’s clock. Morris makes this turn by using the body to administer the mechanisms of a system: the pressure, pace, pattern, and direction of its touch, the capacity of its breath, its physical memory of making a mark. In other words, the body has become the arbiter in these systems whose “rule” defies the notion of the arbitrary itself and instead recuperates the value of motivation. By substituting in the body, Morris transforms by disabling so many conceptualist conceits: task, repetition, automation, and system, among

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them. The body in blind time follows a task, yet instead of becoming inscribed by it, the body unravels inscription, turns it back into trace, brings writing up against its own repressed history. After all, writing and drawing are not such distant relatives. One could say they are “unacknowledged twin[s],” not unlike effects and affects. And like affect, drawing is the more repressed of the pair.62 It was in fact much earlier than 1973 — as early as 1963 — when Morris began to search for “the motivated,” even as he was working through his fascination with systems of the neo-Dada vein. For one month in 1963, Morris produced a series of five single-page-length inscriptions, each a handwritten version of the very same text that summarized several contemporary theories of memory. He titled each of these successive texts Memory Drawing (1963), with the words Initial, First, Second, Third, and Fourth distinguishing one from the next (figs. 2.16 – 2.18). In their neo-Dadaist and proto-conceptualist sensibility, the Memory Drawings are clearly contemporaries of the similarly self-reflective works that I discussed in the first part of this chapter. Again, we see the question of self-consciousness being posed in the Memory Drawings, as Morris devises another system that threatens to close in on itself. However, in the drawings, the familiar irony and ever-so-slightly derisive sensibility have been softened. There is a more genuine search under way. For the system at work in the Memory Drawings has a purposive malfunction that sets it apart from the other early works. Like the Blind Time drawings, the Memory Drawings are systematic but porous. And through those sites where the system doesn’t stay shut, through the apertures where text becomes trace, the motivated finds its way in. Following the production of the Initial Memory Drawing, Morris made each subsequent drawing by reproducing the original text from memory. In a script whose form and content erode and transform subtly, the drawings track the relationship between the original transcription of that text, Morris’s memory of it, and what his hand puts down on the page each time he takes to writing again. From one drawing to the next, adjustments and variances emerge: an “of” is mistakenly replaced by “within”; a sentence turns from its original course in an attempt to recover lost meaning; the tempo and sweep of a single letter quickens here, slows there; the ink from Morris’s pen flows too fast, or elsewhere, it begins to run dry. In some instances, a signified becomes irretrievably lost within an illegible word. As we read

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2.16  Robert Morris, Initial Memory Drawing, ( 9 / 3 /63, 8:00 P.M.), 1963. Ink on paper; 20 ½ × 13 in. (52.1 × 33 cm). Courtesy of Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. © Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

2.17  Robert Morris, Third Memory Drawing, ( 9 / 16 /63, 3:30 P.M.), 1963. Ink on paper; 20 ½ × 13 in. (52.1 × 33 cm). Courtesy of Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. © Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

2.18  Robert Morris, Fourth Memory Drawing, (10/2/63, 9:00 P.M.), 1963. Ink on paper, 20 ½ × 13 in. (52.1 × 33 cm). Courtesy of Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. © Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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the drawings with an eye to the reroutings, substitutions, and cross-outs that happen between them, the gap between writing and signification takes on new form. In effect, something appears in that gap between positions on the grid. Here, writing is drawing, indeed. In no uncertain terms, the Memory Drawings are about forgetting, just as the Blind Time drawings are about blindness. But the occlusions of both are revelatory if not of “value,” as Saussure would have it, then of affect. That is, they expose the texture of experience registered in movement, mediated by the body: the hesitation of the hand and pen, the pressure of the fingers as they sweep downward and lean off to one side, the rush of a string of words that come together as if they were one. The Memory Drawings are about the formal elisions, displacements, and condensations that are the work of memory — but not just Morris’s memory of a text, his ability or inability to recall this or that word; also the ways in which the body’s inscriptions register that remembering and forgetting. Here, then, Morris shows us a special kind of forgetting. For even as Morris writes each new drawing, not only does he forget the original text; writing also forgets itself as such. Writing’s self-forgetting is, ultimately, a forgetting to forget. That is to say, under the pressure of a failing memory, writing recalls its history as trace. This history returns in the form of movement. Perhaps, then, we should not say this is a “failing” memory (although the figure of failure is what indicates that Morris has, as he says, “turned away”). Rather, in another more revealing light, the drawing shows memory hard at work: restoring the forgotten forms to language by bringing them to surface, allowing them to move once more. Like the first series of Blind Time drawings, the Memory Drawings expose written discourse attuned to being turned away, even as it is by its very nature interpellatory: systematic, structural, already “turned around”— writing itself devised, as Plato once warned, as an aid to our failing memories.63 Here we not only see the way in which aesthetic gestures of turning around and turning away are of one and the same movement; we also see that these married gestures can — in special cases — be revelatory, chiastically, of very different modes of meaning. In instances like these, Morris claims that “the work makes itself, so to speak.” And “the artist,” he elaborates, “has stepped aside for more of the world to enter into the art.”64 What might Morris mean by this term, “the world”? The stakes are suddenly so much greater — or at least so it seems. We have seen how Morris’s early systems anticipated his engagement with

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one version of the “world”: a socially and politically meaningful one within which the signifiers “social” and “political” often came to supplant or even supersede “the world,” as if the world could be coterminous with concerns that are circumscribed by the social and political. By 1973 — and perhaps long before — the “world” was for Morris not reducible to “an arena of social and political relevance,” if ever it had been before.65 That arena could only follow from more rudimentary and irreducible terrain: that of motivation, movement, and affect.66 From the early 1960s through to the early 1970s, Morris worked with systems indeed. These, I want now to note, were generally of a profoundly solitary nature, designed to account only for themselves, to represent nothing but themselves. Even the artist’s drawings could be said to have been generated by systems devised to record little more than the indices of their own making. Morris’s systems remained (or so we can generalize) caught up in obsessively self-referential, closed, and singular circuits of production — ironic though many of those circuits were made to seem. And so in spite of my wanting to claim for his drawings an openness that makes room for movement, motivation, affect, and, in effect, the “world,” even the Blind Time drawings retain the residue of that utterly solipsistic — dare I say Cartesian — task that Morris once devised for himself in the making of an early self-portrait: to concentrate only on himself. From such a task, I find myself now saying, the artist never seemed able to shake free. However, in 1976, while undertaking the second series of Blind Time drawings, Morris turned the task of drawing outward, toward an “other,” by setting up a relational framework for his work. While still under the direction of and conditions prescribed by the artist himself, the Blind Time II drawings were devised to be executed by a woman who had been blind since birth. She is known to us only by her initials: “A.A.” “I wanted to continue this [first] series. I had had many assistants in the past and I thought why not have a blind assistant do them for me since that was what I was doing. So I called up the American Association of the Blind and I said I wanted a blind person, a woman that’s never seen, to make drawings for me. They said okay and they gave me a name.”67 Fifty-two drawings comprise this series, which was also carried out with the hands and fingers, although Morris switched the drawing medium from powder graphite to black etching ink. And while still task-oriented,

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2.19  Robert Morris, transcript of drawing session with A.A., 1976. Courtesy of Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. © Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

these drawings were spawned, as it were, by a very different sort of text. Transcriptions from the undated drawing sessions between Morris and A.A. record the language that accompanied the drawing process (fig. 2.19). This dialogue, or so Morris hoped, would become the written component of the second series, and would be inscribed, as usual, at the foot of each drawing’s page. [a.a.:] “I don’t know . . . somewhere I really feel like these are mine, but there’s so much coming out of . . . It would so totally never have occurred to me to do any of this without you. So it feels very much like you. And yet what’s coming out on the page is me.”

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2.20  Robert Morris, Blind Time II, 1976. Etching ink on rag paper, 38 × 50 in. (97 × 127 cm). Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery, New York. © Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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[r.m.:] “It’s hard for me to, uh, articulate, although I said it feels sometimes that you’re an extension of me, in some cases. You know, I’ve always wanted to be a double. I’ve always wanted to be two.”

And from another session: [a.a.:] “I mean some of these drawings are so personal. It’s sort of weird that they’re yours.” [r.m.:] “Well . . . in the sense that sometimes you approach things that I probably couldn’t do or wouldn’t do. And I get you to do that, I get you to do it for me. Because I can’t do it and you do it.”

However, as Morris describes it, the second series of Blind Time drawings was never completed. In the end, not one of the drawings was inscribed with its corresponding dialogic text (fig. 2.20). After the collabora-

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tive drawing process had ended, A.A. began to resist Morris’s direction. As Morris explains, she had become far more attached to the work than he had predicted, her desire showing itself in the scene of his drawing.68 Thus, the final task of selecting portions of dialogue to be transcribed on the drawings resulted in A.A’s refusal first to select excerpts, and then to return the tapes altogether. It was then, because of language — only now made conscious of its dialogic nature and, for better or for worse, of that interminable state of desiring that our entry into it induces — that the Blind Time II series never fully materialized. There is so much to be said about this unfinished series: that for the first time the linguistic positions — the “I” and the “you”— have supplanted the anonymity and corporeality of “the hands”; that it has become quite difficult within the space and time of drawing, as A.A. attests, to hold apart the “I” and the “you,” or even to say in the end to whom these drawings really belong. Where there was once the body’s bilateral symmetry, its shifts in its sense of weightiness, working within and against the page as a spatial matrix for its haptic knowledge, now the page serves as ground for something Morris calls “the self.” Where there was once pressure and distance and relative opacity as analogue for lapsed time, now pressure qualifies a quantity of psychic capital for this or that “area.” Where there had been traces of a body engaged in tasks producing knowledge after the fact, rather than the reverse, now drawing indexes the body showing desire as a rubbed-out area against a blank white field. Where the “I” was at an earlier moment conspicuously suppressed, now the subject makes a first appearance — not surprisingly, by way of the introduction of another. [r.m.:] “Letting the page stand as a ground for yourself, an analog, letting the space of the page stand as an analog for yourself — ” [a.a.:] “Where are you getting this?” [r.m.:] “I’m reading it out of my notebook. Rub out distinct, separate areas with both hands, letting each area represent an area of desire.” [a.a.:] “What the hell are you talking about.” [r.m.:] “Make size and pressure consistent with the strength of the desire. You can name or not name each one of these areas.” [a.a.:] “I’m leaving.”

But lastly and indeed most significantly, in this round of drawing unlike the earlier one, the draftsperson threatens to leave the scene of production

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altogether. It is, finally, in light of the solitary nature that characterizes so many of Morris’s systems produced in the 1960s and ’70s, and from which the artist struggled to free himself, the body, and its affects, that one can make sense of A.A.’s abrupt and affecting departure. For even in this new dialogic way of drawing, there was very little room for another. After all — as Morris himself would say — he “always wanted to be a double”: both the subject and the object of so many systems.

3. The Expanded Field and Other, More Fragile States of Mind

“History . . . is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” 1 The words of James Joyce’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, come to mind when thinking about the recent history of art history, both its dreams and its nightmares, as well as some of the myths that support them. Thirty years ago, we could imagine Stephen’s statement penned by the art historian Rosalind Krauss, who spoke for a generation of American critics who felt haunted by one particular kind of nightmare of history: historicism. I am thinking in particular of Krauss’s 1985 book, The Originality of the AvantGarde and Other Modernist Myths, in which she makes explicit her rejection of the historicist view of the work of art as an organism that develops “out of a past tradition, imbedded in the history of a given medium.”2 In that book, she awakes from historicism’s proclivity to explain away new and seemingly unintelligible forms by constructing a paternity to legitimize and authenticate them.3 In so doing, she leaves behind a world built upon many myths, some of which she names: the myth of genius, the myth of authorial inspiration and determination, the myths of artistic evolution and aesthetic intention; the prioritizing of biographical context and psychological models of creativity; the belief in the existence of private worlds of allu-

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sion; and the humanist notion of the human subject as a set of relations, actions, causes, and effects generated from a coherent, unified, internal, or true self.4 To these things and more, the dream of the information world offered a compelling alternative. Krauss identifies these myths with modernism. But we can also recognize them as associated with — by means of their exclusion from — the structuralist turn that, by 1966, had marked the end of the humanist understanding of the subject as in command of not only himself and a consciousness fully transparent to itself, but also the historical process. Krauss’s list is in fact by now so familiar to us within both art historical discourse and beyond that it seems old hat to recite it again, especially so many years hence. We know well the gains of having debunked these ideas and having embraced at least some of the broader aspects of Krauss’s turn as our own. For decades now, since the “human sciences” announced the arrival of an all-encompassing science of the social, we have celebrated this critical break brought upon the work of art. Krauss’s list of myths belonged, in fact, to her own past. In its day, the book registered her departure from an intellectual allegiance to her former teacher, the “profoundly historicist” Clement Greenberg. She announces this in the introduction to the book: “Practically everything in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths stands in contradiction to [Clement Greenberg’s] position.”5 Instead, she embraced the view that the meaning of all objects including artworks is not substantial but relational in nature, determined not by characteristics that are essential to them, but rather derived through their interplay with other objects in a field structured by differences. In lieu of the myth of the divinized artistmaker as master-creator (in command of his intentions, making decisions and acting from that coherent center, etc.), Krauss began to celebrate the notion that the human locus of production (author, artist, what have you) was “dead.”6 In this chapter, I focus on the essay titled “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” first published in 1979 in October magazine and later selected to be the penultimate chapter of the 1985 book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths.7 The case of “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” is central to my polemic for several reasons. First of all, it was there in the pages of her essay that Krauss brought into the discussion of modernist art for the first time (in any lasting way at least) structuralist terms and theori-

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zations, in effect reshaping discussions and debates within art history and criticism.8 In this way, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” represents a shift, not just in the interpretation of sculpture, circa 1970, but also for art history more generally. It signals the move “toward postmodernism,” to recall the running head that Krauss appended at the top of every other page of the essay when she republished it in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths.9 In “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” Krauss explains that it is a “trick” or a “sleight-of-hand” to call upon “the data of millenia” to construct “elaborate genealogical trees” for such startling and radical art forms as Robert Morris’s Thread Waste (1968), Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), or Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), all under consideration in the essay (figs. 3.1 and 3.2).10 Instead, Krauss encourages us to imagine the artwork as “structural,” and meaning as founded on the basic idea of binary opposition comprised of terms that have no meaning outside of that which is derived through their relation to one another.11 Expanding the binary, Krauss pictures — or, more specifically, she diagrams — a larger field of many synchronically occurring opposing terms or “contraries,” to deploy the language of philosophical logic (fig. 3.3). The inspiration for Krauss’s “expanded field” diagram was derived from linguist and structuralist semiotician Algirdas Julien Greimas, who in 1966 wrote Sémantique structurale, in which he postulated “the existence, beyond the realm of binarity, of a more complex elementary structure of signification.”12 In 1968, in an essay coauthored with François Rastier, Greimas developed the semiotic square, or, as he puts it there, he “adapted [the] formulation . . . formerly proposed” in Sémantique structurale (fig. 3.4).13 Greimas was the first promoter of semiotic structuralism, the most formalized branch of structuralism and also “closest to the hard sciences and to mathematical language.”14 Krauss first came upon and more directly drew her Greimasian inspiration not from the linguist himself but from Fredric Jameson, who deploys the semiotic square in The Political Unconscious (fig. 3.5).15 Krauss explains that by the mid-1970s, “pluralism” had become a term to resort to when something new popped up on the horizon of artistic production — as if a new art form was merely “another thing,” and the radical heterogeneity of such things, “a kind of shish-kabob of things that seemed to be available.”16 Krauss’s impulse to combat the notion of a “free activity productive of . . . objects” was already present in Greimas and Rastier’s essay, wherein they write: “The play in question here is not to be

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3.1 (top) Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, Great Basin Desert, Utah, 1973–76. Tunnels are aligned with the sunrises and sunsets on the solstices. Photo: Nancy Holt. Art © Nancy Holt / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy of the artist. 3.2 (bottom) Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970. Long-term installation in Rozel Point, Box Elder County, Utah. Collection Dia Art Foundation, New York. Photo: George Steinmetz. Art © Estate of Robert Smithson / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Image courtesy of Dia Art Foundation, New York.

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understood as a free activity productive of literary objects, but as a long journey punctuated with compelling choices that leads, through a series of exclusions and of options, manifesting personal and social phobias and euphorias, to the constitution of an original and unique work.”17 The central aim of Greimas and Rastier’s study was to claim, “in open opposition to the suspect tradition of occidental humanism which sets forth literature as a basic datum,” that there is nothing “specifically literary in the play of the creative mind”; that, in effect, literature could not, in a sense, be said to exist quite in the way that we have understood it to.18 Rather, literature, they argued, is but an effect of structure. Similarly, for Krauss, structure had become the antidote not just to historicism, but also to pluralism, and the semiotic square (also called the “Klein Group” in mathematics, the “Piaget Group” in psychology, as well as the “semantic rectangle”) had become a new tool for understanding the radically new and otherwise “unintelligible” face of 1970s sculpture.19 Krauss would map the expanded field of sculpture first by conceiving of one unit of meaning, x (i.e., “landscape”), and then the absence of that meaning, − x (i.e., “architecture”), as well as an opposing system of meaning, 1 / x, (i.e., “not-landscape”) that correspondingly implies its own absence − 1 / x (i.e., “not-architecture”).20 The generation of the square is said to “exhaust the logical possibilities of binary opposition,” thus allowing the art historian to locate new forms not precisely as, but still satisfyingly adjacent

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3.3  Diagram of the Expanded Field from “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 1979, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths by Rosalind E. Krauss. © Rosalind E. Krauss.

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3.4  Semiotic Square from The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints, by A. J. Greimas and François Rastier, Yale French Studies, no. 41, Game, Play, Literature (1968): 86–105. Published by Yale University Press, Yale French Studies. © Yale French Studies. 3.5  Schematic presentation of character system. Fredric Jameson, “Romance and Reification: Plot Construction and Ideological Closure in Joseph Conrad,” 1981. Material reprinted from Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, p. 256. Copyright © 1981 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publishers, Cornell University Press and Taylor and Francis.

to, the familiar term “sculpture”— in spite of the fact that everything that previously had fallen under that sign looked so different.21 Krauss suggests that it is as wrongheaded to see this field of new art practices as inexplicably plural as it is to look back at, say, Stonehenge, or works by Gabo, or Brancusi with the confidence and clarity of the historicist who charts the derivation of objects as a pure succession of forms. Rather, the way to understand what sculpture had become — the “narrow corridors with TV monitors at the ends; large photographs documenting country hikes; mirrors placed at strange angles in ordinary rooms; temporary lines cut into the floor of the desert”— is to see their meaningfulness as a resolution between contradictory concepts, such as landscape and architecture, as Krauss argues — or, rather, landscape and not-landscape, or even notarchitecture and not-landscape.22 According to this view, the production of a meaningful form instead appears rather like “desperate attempts” by the system “to square its own circles and to produce new terms out of itself . . . [to] ‘solve’ the dilemma at hand.”23 Yet everything I have said here thus far is, I believe, to say rather little

The Expanded Field and Other, More Fragile States of Mind

about “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” other than its intellectual heritage and historical situation. My interest in the essay — indeed, what I take to be the interest of the essay if not back then, then most certainly now — is something other than what these facts convey. What is striking about the essay within the historiography of art is its particular kind of longevity, which I credit largely to the essay’s diagrammatic rhetorics, as well as the related conceit of “expandedness” that Krauss deploys. One could say that together these have cast something of a spell over many pedagogues, critics, and art historians who have over the years mobilized them to examine any number of media (fig. 3.6). Indeed, we have seen quite an expansive series of expansions: from “the gaze in the expanded field” to architecture, painting, photography, literature, blackness, even crochet and androids, among many others.24 By pointing to this heterogeneous following, I do not mean to flatten the variations of argument and purpose within the differing mobilizations of the paradigm. Significant differences, indeed there are. All too frequently, the “expanded field” has been deployed in a vulgar sort of way, as but a terminological cue for some notion of metaphorical extension; it rarely suggests an appreciation of Krauss’s essay’s true ambition or logic. But my point is more straightforward: to illuminate the bald fact that the diagram — or, minimally, the mere mention of “the expanded field”— has appeared to an impressive number of authors to have some very special effects. I suggest that these effects — ostensibly hermeneutical in nature — have been amplified by, if not transfigured in, the affective afterlife of “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” In other words, if one traces just a sampling of the arguments that have followed in the wake of the essay, what one finds is not so much a lineage of compelling interpretative operations, but, rather, a vivid expression — dare I say an expansion — of affects: in other words, feelings about the “expanded field,” its logic and graphics, even its pedagogical scenes. This has secured its long life. For even when the paradigm is used correctly, the reader gets the sense that what authorizes its many appearances and reappearances derives from elsewhere. Take, as but one example, George Baker’s 2005 essay “Photography’s Expanded Field.” In the course of an argument about the crisis of the contemporary photographic object, we learn (as the author stages it as something of a confession) that the unquestionability of the structural condition derives from something of a primal scene: “Now, I have been drawing Klein groups and semiotic squares ever since I first met Rosalind Krauss,

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3.6  Poster, “Retracing the Expanded Field” conference, Princeton University, April 2007. © Spyros Papapetros. Design: Lydia Kallipoliti.

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and the reader by this point will not be surprised to learn of how fondly I remember sitting in her office conjugating the semiotic neutralization of things like the terms of gender and sexuality, some twelve years ago.”25 Like all primal scenes, the effect of this one is deferred; thus Baker finds himself still drawing many years hence. These more recent drawings are “at first unclear,” but then they “became immediately compelling.” They become “compelling” because Baker evinces the sense that he, too, has become captive to the diagram’s productions, the thoughts it makes thinkable for him — its “operations,” “oppositions,” “conjugations.”26 After all, who

The Expanded Field and Other, More Fragile States of Mind

or what thinks the expanded field? As its subjects, we are always belated, “situated” somewhere in a field that is structurally generated for us. One could look to other citations of Krauss’s “expanded field”— the artist Sam Durant’s parodic Quaternary Field / Associative Diagram (1998) might come next in line, followed perhaps by Norman Bryson’s relatively early text “The Gaze in the Expanded Field.” But Baker’s suffices here as example enough to begin my line of questioning. So here goes: What is it, precisely, in (or should I say about?) the essay that we (if I can employ the presumptive pronoun) have clung to over the years? Can it really be the conceptual mechanics of the Krauss-Klein diagram, clunky and elusive as they are? What is the work — the real work — of its work? What does it work on? Or rather, who does it work on? And by what means? These questions are propelled by my speculation that what we have become attached to resides in the aesthetics and rhetorics of the diagram itself — its trim, pared-down form, its pseudo-technical look and clean, yet elusive logic. There is also the confident, expansionist vigor that the diagram exhibits — a desire (indeed, our desire, only here it is displaced) to devour all things that might be mastered by its means. By now, circa 2013, being long “after” the moment of being “toward postmodernism,” it is timely if not imperative to consider these questions in addition to the broader question of how we will emerge from the moment that “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” purported to usher us toward. What will we retain of this expansion, this “postmodernism,” even after? What do we risk losing from our movement away from or beyond? What will our reassessment of what we have gained and lost reveal? And how should we describe the directionality and temporality of this emergence? Is it in fact that we move away, beyond, or after? Or rather, is our movement according to some other vector or type of turn? In his opening remarks at the April 2007 Princeton University symposium Retracing the Expanded Field, where a number of art and architectural historians convened to reconsider the essay three decades after its publication, Spyros Papapetros posed a species of my question like so: “The expanded field thirty years after. . . . But what does ‘after’ mean here, no matter how many years may have passed? . . . Is not the expanded field a set of operations that by its very definition only happens after? Is it not a set of structures that had in fact already crystallized before the field was mapped so that the diagram ultimately mirrors what had already happened?”27 Already haunted by the condition of belatedness, how can we conceive of this emergence according

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to a different sort of temporality than that which we have been occupying for so many decades? The dilemma that reverberates through Papapetros’s string of queries— that of being caught within the condition of irremediable belatedness— takes me to the very crux of my argument. Papapetros does not just allude to the temporality of the expanded field; his remark at the same time refers to structuralism and antihumanism, more broadly. I want to claim that “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” reveals that the structuralist turn fixed and, in effect, disfigured the very figure of turning. By this I mean to recall the trope of the “one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion” utilized by Louis Althusser and which I discuss at length in chapter 2.28 For Althusser’s turn metaphorizes the condition of belatedness. Still more significantly, my sights are set on the turn as it functions more broadly as a figure for figuration itself, both within and beyond Althusser.29 For it is on figuration — ironically and incongruously also repressed within the expanded field — that our encounter with the work of art depends. Krauss’s essay and her use of Mary Miss’s Perimeters / Pavilions / Decoys will first help me to introduce the central problematics I want to address (fig. 3.7); the work of Robert Smithson, also subjected to Krauss’s expansionist paradigm, takes us further by making the case not for logic but for illogic; not for the clean and confident intelligibility of the expanded field, but for “a quiet catastrophe of mind and matter” that Smithson uncovers in the accreting and encrusting turns that compose the architecture of crystal forms.30 In chapter 2, I examine the gesture of turning for Robert Morris’s art practice of the 1960s and early ’70s and the discourses of antihumanism that his work engages, specifically Althusser’s famous narrative of the subject who turns around.31 While for Morris that maneuver became by the early 1970s part of his drawing practice and related “search for the motivated,” in “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” Krauss’s turns are made in the service of rendering sculptural forms (or in the language of the essay, “not-sculptural” forms) freshly intelligible — that is to say, structurally legible. However, that is not all that her rhetorical acrobatics produce. By securing the expanded field of sculpture, Krauss at the same time conjures its inverse: a dark, “ontological[ly] absen[t],” and unintelligible space of “pure negativity.”32 This space is not entirely unlike that of Morris’s “motivated,” only in Krauss’s essay the darkness is less something to be recuperated — as Morris does in drawing blind — than something to be relegated. More-

The Expanded Field and Other, More Fragile States of Mind

over, her deployment of the Klein Group signals a turn not only toward structuralism and away from historicism, but also away from a range of valences — bodily, psychical, sensorial, material — that are regarded as prior to or outside of the possibility of being meaningful at all.33 Like Althusser’s individual who never really was, properly speaking, because the subject always-already is, Krauss’s expanded field posits those valences precisely so that they can be disavowed. Recently, Anne Wagner has described this polemical move like so: “The coup is bloodless: a palace revolution staged without a shot. All that is needed — so [Krauss] declares in conclusion — is a single presupposition: the ‘acceptance of definitive ruptures and the possibility of looking at historical process from the point of view of logical structure.’”34 Wagner’s rendering of Krauss is perfectly apropos; for Krauss’s “coup”— aimed, we must imagine, at Greenberg’s palace — is not only bloodless, there is also no corpse, no body. Everything that comes before the coup is, in effect, disappeared. And the new order that the coup puts into place conceals the frightening, visceral, violent mess of the murder of the previous regime.

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3.7  Mary Miss, Perimeters / Pavilions / Decoys, 1978. Wood, concrete, and earth. © Mary Miss. Courtesy of the artist.

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Indeed, that is the magic of structure’s intervention. That is what makes it, in the words of Michel Foucault, “a kind of surface effect, a shimmering foam.”35 Here is another of Krauss’s related and favored structuralist figures: that of the work of art as shallow, its meaning no longer a thing to be mined from its depths, the artist’s, or that of other forms that appear to relate to it.36 Rather, the meaning of the work is said to range over a surface; it is brought into being by terms that act upon one another side by side rather than before and after as one might picture the flow of historicist time. Wanting to be free of the nightmare that the past exists for us in such a determinant way, Krauss’s method could be said to hollow out that space of continuous flow so that what remains is a completely groundless, nonreferential system of signification kept afloat by that absence. All things signiferous require this peculiar arrangement, which is at the same time a peculiar temporality. Recall Freud’s grandchild uttering the phoneme for the word fort. The intelligibility of a single utterance depends, as the psychoanalyst theorized, on the child’s pairing it with a second, opposing term: da. Neither term could be said to come first; the two words arrive together on the scene in a sudden and reciprocally determining moment with the all-at-once-ness of a coup. Before this moment, meaning, properly speaking, does not exist.37 Whatever happens in the moment before the appearance of such surface effects is “confused in the hic et nunc of the all”— to recite Lacan’s formulation. It is rather “the world of words,” he elaborates, “that creates the world of things”— eminently ordered, intelligible, and meaningful — and, in turn, this world casts a great shadow of disorientation and mystification over all that precedes it.38 It is therefore in keeping with the structuralist imagination that Krauss’s privileging of shallowness also requires her to relegate rhetorically those valences that cannot be suspended by the logic of structure. In “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” she conjures an unplumbable space not once but twice: first, as a “black hole in the space of consciousness”; then as the very form of the dark void or central pit of Mary Miss’s Perimeters / Pavilions / Decoys (1978), into which, the art historian seems to worry, from the outset of her essay, that someone might possibly slip: “Toward the center of the field there is a slight mound, a swelling in the earth, which is the only warning given for the presence of the work. Closer to it, the large square face of the pit can be seen . . .” (fig. 3.8).39 These opening lines of “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” recall the words of Adolf Loos, who, in 1910, famously

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3.8 (opposite) Mary Miss, Perimeters / Pavilions / D ecoys, central pit, 1978. Wood, concrete, and earth. © Mary Miss. Courtesy of the artist.

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3.9 (opposite) Mary Miss, Perimeters / Pavilions / Decoys, underground atrium, 1978. Wood, concrete, and earth. © Mary Miss. Courtesy of the artist.

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wrote of architecture: “When we come across a mound in the wood, six feet long and three feet wide, raised to a pyramidal form by means of a spade, we become serious and something in us says: somebody lies buried here. This is architecture.”40 As with Loos, Krauss’s mound provokes an affective state of reverence and fear; it suggests that we take caution in the face of something both unforeseen and already past. With its complicated yet orderly vertical and horizontal wood members along with the indeterminate underworld of the subterranean enclave that receded into inaccessible, dark spaces, Perimeters / Pavilions / Decoys in effect becomes in Krauss’s essay a figure for structure itself (figs. 3.9 – 3.12). Beyond the initial two layers of columns with which Miss constructed the excavated space on the grounds of the Nassau County Museum of Fine Arts in Roslyn, Long Island, she built a hall that wrapped around that central pit and was accessible through four openings at the center of each side. As if to add to the levels of darkness, Miss cut additional openings, too small to fit through, yet large enough to offer a limited view onto what Ronald Onorato called in his catalogue essay, “black, empty voids,” giving way to the perception that this construction of columns and hallways could continue forever.41 Thus, from Loos to Krauss, the unanticipatable “mound” that we come upon in the landscape calls up something more than the idea that death and burial are central to architecture itself; the mound — ponderous in its materiality and its brute presence — wants to say that something buried or otherwise obscured lies beneath the very concept of the expanded field itself. Indeed, that structuralism’s advocates have relied habitually upon the notion of something being “past,” “outside,” “inaccessible,” or even at a final and complete “end”— in order to announce, for example, the death of the subject, referent, or history — is endemic to the discourse. The conceptualization of such termini degrades the sequence ended, muting the excluded material.42 “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” stakes everything on this strategy; Krauss at once conjures and forecloses a space that surrounds both the discursive and literal site where sculpture once was but, by the 1970s, could no longer be said to be. Sculpture had become, she announces, “a kind of ontological absence,” “something that was possible to locate only in terms of what it was not.”43 Neither an object nor a thing, much less the scattered, often ponderous, and almost always difficult to circumscribe forms that had come to populate the artistic field; rather, sculpture had become unthinkable because the sheer weight of its hetero-

3.10  Mary Miss, Perimeters / Pavilions / Decoys, underground atrium, 1978. Wood, concrete, and earth. © Mary Miss. Courtesy of the artist. 3.11  Mary Miss, Perimeters / Pavilions / Decoys, underground atrium, 1978. Wood, concrete, and earth. © Mary Miss. Courtesy of the artist. 3.12 (opposite) Mary Miss, Perimeters / Pavilions / Decoys, underground atrium, 1978. Wood, concrete, and earth. © Mary Miss. Courtesy of the artist.

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geneous, phenomenal data threatened to collapse the category itself. “We stare at the pit in the earth and think we both do and don’t know what sculpture is.”44 We think we both do and don’t know what sculpture is until, that is, the art historian enables us to think it more clearly and completely when sculpture is articulated by and within the possibilities generated by the machinations of the semiotic square; until Krauss herself suspends, as it were, a network of logical relations over that “black hole” (fig. 3.13). “Sculpture,” the category in jeopardy, is saved, finally, by the logic of signification, salvaged from the darkness by becoming a signifier. At last, Krauss announces, we can safely “think [our] way into [the] expan[ded field].”45

Expansion, by Other Means By now I trust that my reader can sense the criticism implicit in my description of the operations (“oppositions” and “conjugations”) of the expanded field, and my implied interrogation of what, precisely, “expansion” entails and, by extension, precludes. Just what kind of expansion is this? In what way expanded? It is worth noting that nowhere in Greimas’s text nor in Jameson’s does the term “expanded” appear. Greimas speaks of “foreseeing” combinations and further possibilities generated by his diagram; along the same lines, he says that combinations are “brought about by the interaction of the different systems,” a futurity that anticipates the activity of expansion but doesn’t go so far as to say so.46 I want to suggest that even in Krauss’s choice of terms — “expanded”— there is an occlusion of depths, as it were; an effort to repress its discursive resonances and historical specificity. After all, “expanded,” like “sculpture,” must be, to quote Krauss herself, “a historically bounded” notion and “not a universal one.”47 Wagner suggests Gene Youngblood’s 1970 text, Expanded Cinema, as Krauss’s “parent text”— the silenced “origins” of her word choice. This insight — that Krauss’s deployment of expansion “sheds any funky residue” of those probable origins, including some debt to figures like R. Buckminster Fuller and unacknowledged “messy ties to both body and mind”— gets us some distance in mining the depths beneath Krauss’s term.48 Youngblood’s famous statement that “when we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded consciousness” is itself a kind of expansion, specifically, of the medium and experience of cinema in the 1960s.49 But Youngblood’s statement is also quite charged; no claim to “universality” there either. Wagner’s point I take as the tip of the iceberg. When overturned, it reveals

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a much more vast and complex interaction among several cultural forces that were at work in the 1960s: the counterculture of the San Francisco Bay Area, the cyberculture that was also concurrently developing there, and experimental multi-screen artistic practices from the Vortex Concerts of the late 1950s to the multimedia projection environments of USCO (“The Company of Us”), the media art collective founded by the engineer Michael Callahan, San Francisco poet Gerd Stern, and Steve Durkee, a New York artist, and that became a site for that counterculture’s experiments with “expanded consciousness.”50 Elizabeth Patterson has traced the history of this interaction, recounting the sensibility of many of these multimedia events alongside readings of other, significant moments in the history of computation technology, such as the first public display of bitmap raster graphics in San Francisco in 1968, at the time considered a revelation in computer technology but in fact derived, argues Patterson, through its inventor’s encounters with the counterculture of the Bay Area, including the environments of USCO and the light shows of the Acid Tests.51 The discourse of “expandedness” operative in that context, then, speaks to multiple valences at once whose combined effects and interactions must

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3.13  Mary Miss, Perimeters / Pavilions / Decoys, central pit, 1978. Wood, concrete, and earth. © Mary Miss. Courtesy of the artist.

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3.14  Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, East Coast / West Coast, 1969. Black-andwhite video, 20 minutes. Art © Nancy Holt and the Estate of Robert Smithson / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

have been anything but logical in their trajectory. The burgeoning representational practices of the computer, psychedelic drug use, mixed-media events — these things all had new and extreme sensory and emotional effects. One notes this sense in Youngblood’s description of a Jordan Belson film that grew out of this period: Suddenly the frame is shattered with a roar and a fiery light in a heaven of boiling multihued gases: a grim, sinister eruption that suggests, according to Belson, “depersonalization, the shattering of the ego-bound consciousness, perhaps through death, perhaps through evolution or rebirth.” This celestial storm of manganese blue and zinc yellow leads into a state of karmic illusions with glacial, floating, aurora borealis lights of red and yellow-whites, rainbow liquid cascades of exquisite sheerness.52

My point is not to insist that such forces could be said to describe the scene of Krauss’s discursive production, nor can I say yet with any certainty — as Wagner believes she can — that Youngblood is any sort of parent to Krauss at all; rather, my aim in briefly recounting this history is to indicate the possibility that either case might be so; that, in effect, it may be the repression of this messy West Coast history that makes Krauss’s field “shimmer,” to bring back Foucault’s word once more. Furthermore, I also want to indicate the bald fact that “expansion” happens, and indeed

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was happening, by other means than those Krauss allows for. After all, as Patterson makes clear, the term itself, “expanded,” was ramifying by 1970 for various purposes and audiences in all but cleanly intelligible, much less diagrammable ways. It connoted synaesthetic, ecstatic, and profoundly sensorial experience. Moreover, the tools for the production of “expanded consciousness were industrial”; but intentions were “transcendental.” “Eastern mysticism,” describes Patterson, “mandala forms, a whirling of images, and a cacophony of sound, epitomiz[ed] the psychedelic sensibility that was then taking form.”53 Robert Smithson’s 1969 video, East Coast / West Coast, indexes this sensibility (fig. 3.14). Smithson — or at least the California artist that he parodies there — is on his way to India. He has stopped off in New York City. Already his stay there is, he moans between cigarette drags, nothing but “a bad trip.” “I really don’t know where it’s at yet here. I really have to psych it out.” For the twenty-two minutes that comprise the video, Smithson converses with Nancy Holt, who fronts as the conceptually oriented and philosophically conscientious “East Coast artist.” The dichotomous pair is admittedly a gross stereotype, and thus the two are necessarily hyperbolic in their characterizations. Holt is sharp and quick-witted as she probes her interlocutor, whose rapidly dispiriting grooviness begins to leave him notably downcast, folded over. “I just bought ten bicycles and have sort of been riding those around,” Smithson reports. nh: Oh yes, well, that’s a very good idea, I think, you know the concept of bicycle riding with ten bicycles, you say? Well, you know that you could make a lot of plans for these ten bicycles, you know. You could make diagrams, within a system . . . rs: . . . I just wanna ride these bicycles, man. I don’t care about, I just don’t care about systems. nh: Well, you know, if you have an ordered approach to, um, to bicycle riding, it can, you know, really stimulate you. You can start to see certain patterns forming. You could take a map, for instance, and ride in certain areas . . . on certain days, and maybe record what you’ve seen in these areas and write it down in a notebook, or something? It really can be very stimulating to your mind. rs: No, I just want to get on a bicycle and ride, man, I just want to ride all over. I just wanna go riding around. I want to feel the sunshine . . . I just love it.

Their effort to perform their roles as artists rooted in markedly different cultural environments and with radically differing sensibilities is halted,

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unquestionably forced, and a bit protracted if not by the effort to extemporize, then by the libations they sip throughout. Still, the parody is no less effective. “I know what you mean, man,” Joan Jonas chimes in from the edge of the screen where she sits, “but you gotta beware of the system.” “I see the traps and the prison that I am in,” Holt proudly responds. rs: I get about four hits a day . . . I really just like spin out on acid. I have my thing going. I don’t care about the system. . . . I did a sunshine piece. I measured sun grams and wrote them down. But I . . . I . . . I’m interested in, like, just working. I don’t care about all that system stuff, all this other stuff. I am out there doing it, I’m doing it! nh: Well, you know that’s a philosophy too. . . . You’re a pragmatist. Yes, you’re some kind of mystical pragmatist. rs: Nahhhh . . . nh: And you have to define yourself better. . . . rs: Definitions are for really uptight types . . . don’t lay that on me, man.

The terms “the System” and “systems” are bandied about repeatedly in the most humorously predictable ways. Smithson, in particular, is insistent on circling back and back to the topic. “The food’s bad here,” he whines. “It’s made out of plastic. . . . That destroys your brain cells. Makes you think about systems.” Offering the counterpoint, Holt scolds her interlocutor: “The senses have very, very well-defined limitations. There are just so many things you can sense. There are sense thresholds.” Smithson retorts: Conceptual art is a bunk. . . . It’s a felt, it’s feeling, it’s felt. I feel it. It’s all bullshit what you are talking about. Bullshit. . . . Did you ever take acid? . . . I am a human being. . . . I just swing with all these human responses. I meet people. I meet a ditch digger and I say, “How are you doing today?” And they say, “Look at the sky.” And I look at the sky and I say, “Beautiful, man.” And what do you say? You say, “Make a system out of it.”

In looking to East Coast / West Coast, my point is neither to argue for an expanded consciousness in Youngblood’s sense nor to propose that we use Smithson’s “West Coast” mode to “psych out,” “swing with,” or even “feel” our way to a different sort of understanding of 1970s sculpture than the one Krauss or even Holt proposes — though one might well do so. Rather, it is by means of its awkwardness and parodic overstatement that East Coast / West Coast intimates that there are depths beneath the surface of the expanded field and suggests the possibilities for expansion by other

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means. The presence of Smithson in the video further reminds us that the artist’s work was also meant to be read as part of Krauss’s interpretative system. Specifically, Krauss cites Mirror Displacements in the Yucatan (1969), Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), and Spiral Jetty (1970). These are merely representative of the many post-1965 Smithson works that fit the bill. Although in his role Smithson performs a kind of contestation of the very idea of the system as a “bad trip,” it was only one year earlier and in a voice unmistakably his own that Smithson would refer to the system as “a nightmare from which [he was] trying to awake,” “a ‘bad dream’ that has somehow consumed the world.”54 To many before me, Smithson would seem to belong to the larger trajectory of Krauss’s essay: “toward postmodernism.” Most famously, in his 1979 essay “Earthwords,” Craig Owens sought to describe Smithson’s work as the substance of signs. There, Owens calls upon the words Jacques Derrida spoke in Baltimore, in 1966, at The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man symposium, to which I earlier referred. “What is described by Smithson . . . is that dizzying experience of decentering which occurred ‘at the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse.’ ” This is the passage where Derrida adds, “That is to say, when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences.”55 For Owens, Derrida catalyzes and helps to situate Owens’s characterization of Smithson’s work as “coincide[nt] with the techniques of poststructuralist theory” and, more broadly, “postmodern.” But Owens was merely among the first to pursue this interpretative trajectory. Jennifer Roberts contends that “the predominant approach has been to position Smithson as a key, often the key, figure in the transition from ‘modern’ to ‘postmodern’ models of art production in the United States.” She adds that because the various poststructuralist theories informing this criticism have “tended to focus on examining Smithson’s work as a disruption or displacement of a specific form of mid-century modernism, this approach has been limited by what literary critic Alan Liu calls the ‘historically foreshortened’ quality of much postmodernist discourse.”56 And so although the horizon of Smithson scholarship has shifted and expanded in recent years, most notably due to Roberts’s exemplary work, I resurrect the poststructuralist Smithson here because he emerged alongside Krauss’s essay and represents the moment when — to

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repeat the Derridean formulation — “everything became discourse . . . when everything became a system. . . .” To be sure: the world Smithson imagines is a structured, even structural one; he had a fascination with systems and grids of many sorts. However, Smithson’s systems adhere not to the logos of structuralist principles, but to the alogos of the form that crystals take.57 His systems do not yearn for intelligibility, let alone a Barthesian “euphoric scientificity”; rather, they reflect what he calls “a sedimentation of the mind,” a “turbidity of thinking,” also detectable in his writerly style.58 My invocation of the figure of the crystal derives from Smithson’s well-known fascination with the architecture of mineral and geological forms, which comes through clearly in his work and writings where he borrows the terminology of crystallography and is further evidenced in his extensive interdisciplinary library.59 The significance of crystallography for Smithson was so great that it not only launched his mature career, as the artist himself once claimed, but also, as Roberts persuasively makes the case in Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History, “delivered Smithson from his ‘preoccupations with history.’ ”60 Indeed, correspondences do exist between the structuralist worldview and Smithson’s crystalline one. Both the structuralist sign system and the crystal grow from a singular rupture: the first phoneme, the first cubic facet. Seen though Smithson’s eyes, everything seems to participate in this crystalline structure: the “geological networks” of crisscrossing highways, the “tiny boxlike arrangements” of the “middle-income” housing developments, and the dials on his car radio, which, the artist notes, take the shape of “cantilevered cubes.” One could say that this was Smithson’s version of the structuralist mantra that claimed all cultural phenomena to be “structured like a language.”61 After a day of searching for crystals at a New Jersey quarry in 1966, Smithson and friends go for ice cream, and he can’t help but see crystals everywhere: “Ice, H2O, water, specific gravity — .92, colorless to white, luster adamantine, transparent on thin edges. Beneath the surface the hexagonal crystals grow downward into the water, parallel to each other, making a fibrous structure, which is very apparent when ice is ‘rotten.’ . . .”62 Above all, what Smithson saw in and took from the crystal was a particular kind of “self-perpetuating” “imperfection” known as “screw dislocation.”63 Screw dislocation in fact promotes the growth of a crystal through the production of surface ledges resulting from the emergence of molecular misalignments in the crystal face (figs. 3.15 and 3.16). Dislocated mol-

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ecules create step-like edges, the accretion of which eventually produces a form that appears like a spiral staircase — a motif that Smithson deployed time and again in his work. It seems that it was the marriage of this turning movement together with the sedimentation of matter embodied by the crystal form that Smithson found compelling. Nonetheless, it is important to bear in mind that for all of Smithson’s fascination with crystals, his use of crystallographic terminology and form, was, as Roberts is quick to point out, neither scientifically motivated nor comprehensive, often faulty and haphazard, and always selective and idiosyncratically deployed. She contends that it was precisely this “opportunism” on Smithson’s part that allows us to “better identify the ideological niches that he enlisted crystallography to fill.” Specifically, for Roberts, these include the failure of established historical models and the imperative to nonetheless entertain and invent a range of historical operations whose “critical possibilities . . . have only begun to be explored.”64 With quite a different polemic in mind, what I want to underscore about the crystal form and Smithson’s idiosyncratic and “opportunistic” engagement with it is the following: first, that the crystal offers a compelling alternative to the structuralist, or antihumanist, turn that I foreground throughout this book. The crystal turns, in the first place, in error, not as a symbolic corrective nor as a cultural imperative. This misalignment is then self-perpetuating — in theory, at least, and certainly, as we will see, in the practice of Smithson’s work, such that the crystal keeps on rotating. The crystal enables this activity not by means of an abstract, invisible, or even allegorical figuration, but rather by virtue of the stuff presented to its surfaces and the way in which outside matter accommodates to the particular orderliness of the growing crystal. 65 “Everything is two things that converge,” commented Smithson in 1969. “This range of convergence,” he elaborates, “is really the great area of speculation.”66 As an alternative to a field structured by differences, where a signifier can be “locate[d] only in terms of what it [i]s not,” one glimpses this great area of speculation in Smithson’s sculptural and discursive convergences. 67 “Artists are getting a firm grip on this,” he elaborates. “. . . they’ve been relegated to the garret for some time now, and it’s just that they know what material is, and they know what the degree of abstraction is, and the two somehow blend, and I think that this starts a fruitful dialogue, something that can be very open ended.”68 This great area of speculation also manifests in Smithson’s haphazard

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and experimental manner of reading crystallographic discourse. To put this another way: his mode of reading is in itself crystalline. Perhaps, then, Smithson was less interested in “filling ideological niches,” as Roberts contends, than he was in developing a practice — interpretative, artistic, writerly — propelled by a rhetorical gesture itself modeled after screw dislocation (which, in turn, enabled the artist to “fill” those “niches”). Without deploying the figure of the crystal, Lytle Shaw makes a similar suggestion when he notes that Smithson’s writing is comprised of “a series of experimental (and experiential) rhetorics charged with radically new functions.”69 A closer look reveals that Smithson’s crystallographic adaptations were generated by skewed, erroneous, ever-shifting, or oblique points of view; furthermore, many of the sculptural works he produced, in turn, exhibit this same modality. In “Entropy and the New Monuments,” where Smithson considers the sculptural practices of some of his contemporaries, he seems to refer to just this sort of practice when deriving the notion of a “Manneristic” math, dislocated “from its original meaning.”70 Such forms appear logical according not to the rule of logos, but to the behavior of a kind of material reason — the mind, one could say, of sediment. Such a mind allows for, as Smithson would say, “more fragile states” than that of the who, or the what, that thinks the expanded field.71 The mind of sediment — a notion that I derive from Smithson’s prose — also brings us back to the crystal and its sedimentary logic. The crystal, moreover, is a substance that appears to think.72 Moreover, Smithson’s work does not only turn in the manner of the crystal; in turning, it accumulates and encrusts, and in progressing, it “dislocates” its original intention or “meaning,” but never does it dissolve or vanish beneath a shallow expanse — as Krauss would have it.73 This is not to say that Smithson was not mindful of structuralism’s “shimmering foam.” It appears in the range of discourses that Smithson mobilizes in his writing: science fiction, geology, travel narrative, cartography, poetry, art criticism, philosophy, among others. However, significantly, Smithson’s deployment of discourse of any form was attentive not just to the materiality of language, but also, as Shaw argues, to the “institutional and social palpability of discourses,” such that discursive transparency becomes in Smithson’s hands rather like lexical sediment.74 Recall my consideration of Sol LeWitt’s drawing, with which I opened chapter 1: about LeWitt’s “ ‘sepia’ handwriting,” Smithson notes its “oppressive weight” that makes reading it “like getting words caught in your eyes.”75 Here, it is as much Smithson’s

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3.15 (opposite, top) Screw dislocation diagrams, reprinted from Charles William Bunn, Crystals: Their Role in Nature and Science, 1964, p. 47. © 1966 Elsevier Ltd. 3.16 (opposite, bottom) Electron micrograph of screw-dislocated crystal by I. M. Dawson, reprinted in Charles William Bunn, Crystals: Their Role in Nature and Science, 1964, p. 149. © 1966 Elsevier Ltd.

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description of LeWitt’s language as the drawing itself that performs crystallographic dislocation. One discerns this sort of palpable transparency, this static movement in Smithson’s derivation of the 1968 sculpture, Leaning Strata — a work that hardly exceeds the parameters of Krauss’s conception of modernist sculpture, but certainly anticipates the terrain of the expanded field essay nonetheless (fig. 3.17). In the preparatory drawing for this work, the artist utilized the paper’s surface to stage the convergence of two distinct visual codes: a gridded schema diagrams the transversals and orthogonals of a central perspectival vantage; at their point of vanishing, a second system emerges: a series of concentric circle radiate outward, overlapping the deep space (figs. 3.18 and 3.19). Unlike the perspective diagram, these circles appear to sit right on the paper’s surface, like ring-shaped stains left behind by a coffee cup — they are set in tension with the plane mapped out by the more darkly inscribed right angle in the foreground that serves to suggest a window or frame of “seeing through.”76 By contrast, that frame anticipates and facilitates perspectivalism’s proportional enlargements and foreshortenings of the visible world. The circles, as Robert Hobbs shrewdly discerned decades ago, resemble an inchoate “cartographic configuration”— much like that Smithson relied upon for Entropic Pole (1967),77 which helps us to imagine those concentric circles as the beginning of an orthographic construction centered on a pole, similar to the projections diagrammed in cartography manuals (figs. 3.20 and 3.21).78 By locating its light source at infinity, an orthographic projection systematically renders the patterns of meridians and parallels of the earth onto a flat surface, in effect, suggesting a vantage that sees every point from directly overhead. The point at the center of the Drawing for Leaning Strata serves a double function: it signifies the vanishing point of the perspectival system and provides a center from which the cartographic forms radiate. It is both a sign of that infinitely distant point and an index of a tiny puncture, which anchored Smithson’s compass, allowing him to swing perfect circles. In one minute mark, the drawing constructs a split identity, the convergence of two things: meta-sign and literal hole. Its meaning is, at once, to organize, via a syntax that arrives with it, a coherent, unified image and, at the same time, to be a scar left behind after an act of making. For Smithson, this tiny mark is absolutely critical. It is what links the two systems that have been brought together there on the surface of the

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page, motivating their interaction. And when the two meet, the mind locks up for a moment. Neither system can explain what the two are doing to one another. Smithson figures this in language: “The landscape of logic [is crushed] under glacial reveries.” “Ideas decompose into stones of unknowing.”79 The mark becomes “a device for unlimited speculation,” which ruptures the perspectival ordering of the visible world.80 Ultimately, this point is what opens the way for the redactive work that the circles perform on the checkerboard ground squares, opening up the grid to the third dimension. Each circle takes its turn capping the orthogonals, chipping away at the possibility that they will ever meet their point of flight.81 When the incongruous systems meet, they form a preposterous and misaligned space, which carves out a region between the two-dimensional schemas and which neither schema on its own allows us to imagine. Leaning Strata is, in effect, born as an “artistic disaster”— to borrow another of the artist’s apt expressions. It is, much like the crystal’s fault-riven existence, “a

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3.17  Robert Smithson, Leaning Strata, 1968. Aluminum and paint, 49 ½ × 105 × 30 in. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Donation of Virginia Dwan. Art © Estate of Robert Smithson / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Image Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York / Shanghai.

3.18 (opposite) Robert Smithson, Drawing for Leaning Strata, 1968. Pencil and ink on paper, 24 × 19 in. Art © Estate of Robert Smithson / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Image Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York / Shanghai. 3.19 (top, left) Perspective construction. Leon Battista Alberti, De pictura, 1435. 3.20 (top, right) Construction of an orthographic projection centered on a pole. © Eve Meltzer. Image: Michael Siegel, Rutgers Cartography Services. 3.21  Robert Smithson, Entropic Pole, 1967. Map collage and Photostat. Collage: 15½ × 15½ in.; Photostat: 18 × 19 in. Art © Estate of Robert Smithson / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Image Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York / Shanghai.

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quiet catastrophe of mind and matter,” by means of which the “great area of speculation” becomes available.82 The resulting steel sculptural form, obdurate and opaque, emerges from the interface of two systems of two-dimensional rendering of the threedimensional world. Leaning Strata is precisely a “stone of unknowing.” As Smithson would say, “sightings fall like heavy objects from one’s eyes.”83 The title also has its say: Leaning Strata. With those words, Smithson names the equivocation performed by schematic drawings — the way in which the orthogonals and transversals both ascend the surface of the page, moving our eyes vertically upward, and, at the same time, invoke a receding, illusionistic space, pressing us to look inward. “Leaning” conjoins those activities; it materializes that equivocation and figures it as geologic strata. This leads me to say in no uncertain terms what I hope the above already has made clear: that in spite of a certain isomorphism that obtains between the order of the crystal and that of structuralism, the crystalline materiality of Smithson’s work, which represents phenomena and modes of thought in our world, are not accommodated by the structuralist worldview. That matter, too, remains in the proverbial pit — to bring back Miss once more. In recent years, philosophers and cultural critics have begun to question if and how anything matters for structuralisms of varied sorts, emphasizing with that multivalent word that there is a relationship between signification and materiality that the linguistic idealism of structuralism cannot account for. “To know the significance of something,” writes Judith Butler, “is to know how and why it matters, where ‘to matter’ means at once ‘to materialize’ and ‘to mean.’ ”84 The question of meaning when thought in this way is especially pertinent to the recent history of art, whose objects include Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Partially Buried Woodshed (fig. 3.22). Conceived and executed in 1970 while at Kent State University, four months before the notorious shootings occurred there, the matter of Partially Buried Woodshed cannot possibly be circumscribed by one woodshed and twenty truckloads of earth; nor can we see it merely in light of the cultural shift that the shootings have represented. How does the semiotic square generate the woodshed’s trajectory? How does it produce it expansively enough when it is situated there between two terms: landscape and architecture? In other words, what really matters in the expanded field? Some final questions present themselves: how do we recover materiality for the expanded field in order to make certain that such things as Smithson’s shed appear to us as expansive as they are, and in the particular

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3.22  Robert Smithson, Partially Buried Wood Shed, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, January 1970. One woodshed and twenty truckloads of earth; 18 ft. 6 in. × 10 ft. 2 in. × 45 ft. Art © Estate of Robert Smithson / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Image courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York / Shanghai.

manner that they are? How would we make such a move of recovery, particularly without merely turning back around, as it were, without forsaking the gains of antihumanism, or even of postmodernism? For such a move would appear to constitute a return (and an especially dreaded one at that) to historicism, essentialism, and all the other abandoned modalities of thought that Krauss and the artists she considers had hoped to dismantle; that would be to remain oriented within a discursive framework where belatedness is the rule, and being an “effect of” that framework is the only available option. How, rather, to liberate — as Smithson so clearly sought to — the figure of turning itself? How to allow that figure to move differently, so that it might signify something beyond what we have ourselves been figured into thinking? With so many turns in mind — from the structuralist turn to the postmodernist one, from Krauss’s turn to Smithson’s crystals — what we need

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to remind ourselves is the fact that “turning” translates the Greek sense of trope. Looking again at Althusser’s scene of the subject who turns around, Butler points out that “the trope of the turn both indicates and exemplifies the tropological status of the gesture” of being subjected to structural order. That is to say that subjection, as she writes, “inaugurate[s] tropology in some way.” In other words, as subjects we begin figuring and begin to function through figuration — an important aspect of subjective experience that seems to have been repressed if not radically limited within the structural order of the expanded field.85 Above all, then, what needs recuperating is not so much something we might return for — be it historicism, essentialism, or the “aesthetic”— but rather other kinds of turns, both their effects and their affects, not just the type of turn that structuralism has settled on. Such a recuperation could offer a fresh conception of and interpretative relation to art after antihumanism, as well as open up a truly more expansive model of the human subject. As for affect: it, too, resides in that “range of convergence” that Smithson speaks about. Smithson dwells upon this in his writings about laughter. He realizes that laughter is “a kind of entropic ‘verbalization,’ ” and he recalls that R. Buckminster Fuller was “told by certain scientists that the fourth dimension was ‘ha-ha,’ in other words, that it is laughter.”86 Between laughter and the crystal structure, Smithson theorizes, we arrive at a “device for unlimited speculation.” After all, there is not one, but potentially infinite varieties of “solid-state hilarity.” Smithson names but six: Let us now define the different types of Generalized Laughter, according to the six main crystal systems: the ordinary laugh is cubic or square (Isometric), the chuckle is a triangle or pyramid (Tetragonal), the giggle is a hexagon or rhomboid (Hexagonal), the titter is prismatic (Orthorhombic), the snicker is oblique (Monoclinic), the guffaw is asymmetric (Triclinic).87

Let us, then, surmise that each type of laugh could be said to represent the crystallographic dislocations that comprise affective states, more generally. This leads me to conclude that speculative feelings — like laughter — represent the very sort of turn that Smithson’s work relied so much upon, and for which, even decades later, it still appears to advocate.

4. After Words

Something at once lost, forgotten, remembered and hoped for. “ə” as in “me.” — Mary Kelly, “Documentation VI” (1978), Post-Partum Document

My account of this aesthetico-theoretical adventure will conclude on the other side of where it began, in the light of some sort of aftermath, as it were, or, more radically, total foreclosure. At least this would seem to be the case were we to take at face value the naked temporality of before and after for which the structuralist imaginary pines. Imagining things otherwise (the larger aim of this book), one could say that in this final chapter I come back once more to the year with which I began — 1973 — but that the terms and the feeling are now quite different. For the sake of my polemic, Mary Kelly will be the one to mark this fact, and she does so in many ways. For starters, she indicates it temporally through the titles of the two works she produced in tandem that year: first Antepartum — a mere ninety seconds of film made infinitely recursive — and then, later that year, with Post-Partum Document, an expansive, multipart work that would take the artist six full years to complete. Yet the rupture suggested by this pairing does not, in fact, tell us all that much about what we need to know, even as it purports to sum it up clearly and conveniently. Rather, the story of the subject — or, rather, subjects (for in Kelly’s world, unlike Morris’s, subjects are, if nothing else, always in relation) — will have to be discerned both through and in

4.1  Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 1973–79. Installation view, Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1998. © Generali Foundation. Photo: Werner Kaligofsky. Courtesy of the artist. 4.2  Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 1973–79. Installation view, Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1998. © Generali Foundation. Photo: Werner Kaligofsky. Courtesy of the artist.

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spite of this temporality and the theoretical paradigms that subtend it. This story will have to be understood by means of its informational look, which both bespeaks and defies the structuralist imaginary, resounding with that sense of irremediable belatedness while also registering the affects and the attachments that occur along with it. Post-Partum Document is comprised of 135 discrete units that Mary Kelly produced in six stages between the years 1973 and 1979. In its full scope, it tracks the first six years of the life of the artist’s son as he becomes a subject of language and takes his place in the social order. What was “born” as an installation subsequently “grew up” as an exhibition, and ultimately “reproduced itself,” as Kelly says, as a book (figs. 4.1 and 4.2).1 Both the child and the work are, then, the subjects of the work and, therefore, they are also the “work” of the work, for in large measure what Post-Partum Document represents is the making of subjects — that production, as I outlined in chapter 2, that Louis Althusser once aimed to describe in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Because the subject becomes a subject in the moment and gesture of being subjected (before which he or she is a pre-subject or, in Althusser’s terminology, an “individual”), there is no subject who is not always-already the subject, or as Étienne Balibar has explained, “There is no structural constitution of the subject that is not, if not an image and resemblance of the Creator like the metaphysical subject, at least the performance or ironic enactment of a linguistic causa sui.”2 The very notion of a “linguistic causa sui”— something generated within and by itself and completely circumscribed by the nature and function of language — Mary Kelly knew well. In fact, as an artist who had readily embraced conceptualist principles by the early 1970s, and as a founder of the National Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain, Kelly had come to have a great deal of affection for such gestures and their theoretical stagings. Post-Partum Document also takes Mary Kelly as its subject, one who feels herself to be always-already (artist, feminist, mother, and woman), yet also in excess of that circumscription. As she documents her son’s productions, she also records her own attempts to read those marks and be read by them, from his infamous “dirty nappies” (fig. 4.3), to his first words (fig. 4.4), his drawings (fig. 4.5), and, finally, his inscription of his own name — significantly, the composite of his mother’s and father’s last names: Kelly Barrie. Yet upon first viewing Post-Partum Document, one might also say of Kelly’s

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4.3  Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, “Documentation I: Analyzed Fecal Stains and Feeding Charts,” 1974, 1 of 31 units. Perspex unit, white card, diaper linings, plastic, sheeting, paper, ink, 28 × 35.5 cm each. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the artist.

4.4  Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, “Documentation II: Analyzed Utterances and Related Speech Events,” 1975, 1 of 26 units. Perspex unit, white card, wood, paper, ink, rubber, 26 units, 20.5 × 25.5 cm each. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the artist.

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4.5  Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, “Documentation III: Analyzed Markings and Diary-perspective Schema,” 1975, 1 of 13 units. Perspex unit, white card, sugar paper, crayon, 13 units, 35.5 × 28 cm each. Tate Modern, London. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the artist.

attempts to account for the first years of her son’s life and her complex experience of it, that they appear less an activity of documenting than one of graphing, charting, schematizing, even mathematizing. In fact, graph, chart, schema, matheme, and diagram literally come first within Post-Partum Document. Figures culled from various sources from fields as diverse as linguistics, art history, and pediatrics introduce each of the six documentations as if to announce that the material archived there, from fecal stain to phoneme, has already also been rendered in the scientific mode. One figure graphs metabolism in the first year of life (fig. 4.6); another introduces the third documentation with a perspectival schema (fig. 4.7), still another

4.6  Mary Kelly, “Metabolism in the First Year of Life.” From I. A. Abt, Pediatrics, 1923. Reproduced in Post-Partum Document, “Documentation I: Prototype, 1974,” 1 of 31 units. Installation, 10 parts, Analysis of fecal stains and feeding charts. January 1–7, 1974, 7 diaper linings with fecal stains, plastic foil, text, ink on white cardboard, 3 black-and-white photocopies. Framed in acrylic glass boxes, 36.3 × 28.7 × 3.5 cm each. “Diagram I, Analysis of fecal stains and feeding charts,” January 1–7, 1974. © Generali Foundation. Courtesy of Generali Foundation.

4.7  “Take a square ABCD (in perspective). Produce AD and BC to intersect at V. The point V is the central vanishing point (on the horizon or eye level). Produce the diagonal AC to meet the eye level: this gives the distance point DP. Mark off a number of equal divisions along AG passing through B. Join these points to DP and V. The intersections on VG will give the horizontal coordinates and the intersections along AB will give the orthogonal co-ordinates.” From F. Dubery and J. Willats, Drawing Systems, 1972. Reproduced in Mary Kelly, “Documentation III: Analyzed Markings and Diary-perspective Schema,” Post-Partum Document, 1975, 1 of 13 units, blackand-white photograph. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the artist. 4.8  Diagram from R. Jakobson and M. Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 50–53. Reproduced in Post-Partum Document, “Documentation VI: Prewriting Alphabet, Exergue and Diary,” 1978. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the artist.

4.9  Mary Kelly and son, photograph of recording session, 1975, included as frontispiece, Post-Partum Document (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Photo: Ray Barrie. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the artist.

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4.10  Mary Kelly and son, photographs of recording session, 1975. Photos: Ray Barrie. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the artist.

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diagrams what Roman Jakobson once described as the “partitioning” of the “primary triangular pattern of phonemes” that occurs in language acquisition (fig. 4.8).3 In sum, a great deal of Kelly’s language is elaborately and hermetically theoretical, such that the labor of motherhood often is made to look not like the usual images of bathing, changing, and attending to the child at night, but rather like that of an overworked mind. Clearly this means of picturing by not picturing owes its debts to the conceptual art movement that supplied Kelly with an idiom well-equipped to sidestep the problem of always representing feminine identity in or as the female body, and always representing domestic labor as already gendered. Given the diagrammatic face of Post-Partum Document, then, it is no surprise that the artist included only one photograph in the whole of the work (fig. 4.9). Yet it was not that there were no other photographs taken over those years. Primapara (1974), a closely related series comprised entirely of photographic close-ups of the artist’s infant son, might very well have been incorporated into the larger work. There were also several other images captured during the 1975 recording session from which the single photograph was drawn (fig. 4.10). Those images elaborate the aspects of that event: the mother coaxing her son to speak; the child mimicking his mother’s actions; the mother’s resistance; the child’s insistence. But as critics have argued time and again, Kelly regularly chooses to subject her viewer to a radical economy, even an absence of more conventionally “visual” terms, sometimes in exchange for a surplus of linguistico-­

After Words

informational ones.4 Hence her decision here: select only the most iconic image of the lot and make it the frontispiece for the 1983 book version of the work, also titled Post-Partum Document. The photograph pictures the artist with her son who has settled into his mother’s lap and is now captivated by the camera and his father, who stands behind it. It is, the artist admits, an image after the Pietà — perhaps Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo or Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist.5 Yet if this Mary — this mother figure — grieves the loss of her son, the photograph intimates that it is not in the aftermath of his crucifixion but proleptically, in anticipation of his “symbolic castration.”6 It is because she already knows full well that her son will soon make his entry into language and the social order; that he will, in effect, be cut off from the plenitude and presence that characterizes the mother-child dyad. Inevitably, as Lucy Lippard once put it, culture will “kidnap” him.7 Kelly has anticipated this fact; in a sense, she has even encouraged it by turning over to her son the microphone with which she will record his early single-word speech events. And, in turn, he seems to know exactly what to do with the borrowed tool. Soon he will become captivated by and captive to the agency that promulgates the law of the social order: the symbolic father. In fact, in this photo he already turns his attention in that direction — toward his real father, who is classically and markedly absent from it, indeed present in and as that absence that structures the photograph itself. And while the symbolic father is a figure far in excess of

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the real one who shoots the photograph, even this father enjoys a prerogative that is made visible by the attention that the child pays him in the photograph, an attention that he, as photographer, has secured from his son.8 Mother, child, and microphone. There are three visible figures in this photograph. Each displaces the last by pulling symbolic rank on the one that precedes it. What the microphone takes from the child (literally speech and, by extension, the plentitude of the here and now), the child, in turn, takes from his mother.9 His body, arranged as it is in her lap, also participates in a symbolic economy. In Freud’s terms, he is his mother’s “penisbaby,” which, “in accordance with an ancient symbolic equivalence,” fills in for the phallic privilege she does not have, disavowing, in effect, her feminine lack and “establishing” her “feminine situation.”10 He is positioned in her lap as if in analogy to the phallus; in turn, the microphone acts as his. But when the child begins to speak, to turn toward language and, at the same time, his father’s gaze, he takes back that temporary substitute from his mother — castrating her, yet again.11 If, therefore, the Mary in the photograph, like that of the Pietà, grieves over the body of her son, it is because she grieves her own body as well, marked as it is by loss — the loss, as Kelly says, of “the ability to represent.”12 Psychoanalytic readings such as the one I have begun to perform here come easily to this photograph — too easily, in fact. We could say the same for the whole of Post-Partum Document. Photographs are easily given to such misrecognitions. Indeed, in selecting and positioning this photo within Post-Partum Document, Kelly must have known this one would function in this way. In part, we see psychoanalysis in this image, as we do throughout the entire work, because of Kelly’s own debt to and saturation in psychoanalytic thought. For example, in “Documentation II: Analyzed Utterances and Related Speech Events” (1975) (fig. 4.11), the child’s early phonemic pairings —“/gah/” (or, “kitty is ‘gone’”) and “/dit-dy/” (“ ‘kitty’ is there”) — seem to fall in line effortlessly with those of Freud’s grandson, who in throwing a spool in an invented game of disappearance and return, Freud explains, also “throws” himself into language by pairing the word fort (gone) with the word da (here) (fig. 4.12). Similarly, in “Documentation V: Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index” (1976 – 77), the queries the child puts to his mother appear to be the unmistakable mark of the onset of castration anxiety (fig. 4.13). It is psychoanalysis that has given us narratives such as these. And over the past half-century or so, they have come to function as

4.11  Mary Kelly, Post­Partum Document, “Documentation II: Analyzed Utterances and Related Speech Events,” 1975, detail of installation view. Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1998. Perspex unit, white card, wood, paper, ink, rubber, 26 units, 20.5 × 25.5 cm each. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. © Generali Foundation. Photo: Werner Kaligofsky. Courtesy of the artist. 4.12 (below) Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, “Documentation II: Analyzed Utterances and Related Speech Events,” 1975, 1 of 23 units. Perspex unit, white card, wood, paper, ink, rubber, 20.5 × 25.5 cm each. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. © Mary Kelly.

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4.13  Mary Kelly, “Research VII,” from Post-Partum Document, “Documentation V: Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index,” 1977, 1 of 36 units. Perspex units, white card, wood, paper, ink, mixed media, 36 units, 13 × 18 cm each. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia.

ready-made theories, providing the scaffolding for a system of thought whose mere invocation is enough to lay the whole of it before our eyes. Suddenly, mother, son, and microphone become figures in a tale of family rites — birth, death, sacrifice, castration — all told like a Sophoclean tragedy, in which every road leads unwittingly home. Indeed, home is one of the more overdetermined terms in the story of King Oedipus, wherein the unwitting perpetration of the murder of a father by his son is dramatized. Remember that Oedipus attempts to dodge his fate by taking “the road leading away from what he believed was home.”13 The psyche itself is also one sort of home — more specifically, the unconscious, which houses the wishes that Oedipus is unable to avert no matter how hard he tries. Home is multiply determined in Post-Partum Document: it is the center of domesticity, the literal and discursive site where Mary Kelly finds herself with a new kind of rudimentary work — her “first labor,” as it were, her primapara — the work that is at once the labor of child care and at the same time the labor of representation. Speaking not exactly of “homes” but rather of “centers,” Lacan once

After Words

wrote that the unconscious is “the true centre of the human being . . . no longer to be found at the place assigned to it by a whole humanist tradition.”14 This we chalk up to one more effect of the antihumanist turn. PostPartum Document reminds us that, in turn, psychoanalysis itself has come to occupy that central, originary site as the science of the formation of an Anglo-American bourgeois subjectivity. Psychoanalytic narratives, especially Lacan’s structuralist renditions, have provided the building blocks of that science, which, while not based on the positivist model of the socalled “exact sciences” whose object is “the field of phenomena in which there is no one who uses a signifier,” is nonetheless predicated on a high degree of mathematical formulation. Lacan called psychoanalysis a “conjectural science” practiced by “beings who inhabit the symbolic order.” 15 However, at times even Lacan blurred the distinction, suggesting that the arrival of structural linguistics had provided an exacting paradigm for the conjectural sciences. For all that it has contributed to the antihumanist imaginary and despite its eminently unmasterable object, it is clear that psychoanalysis, too, has been seduced by mastery, its illusions and its rhetorics. After all, it is psychoanalysis that has told us that the psyche is an “apparatus,” which, despite its complexity can, like a machine, be diagrammed (fig. 4.14). It has suggested that the elusive “question of the subject in his existence” is one that can be schematized (fig. 4.15). Even such matters as sexual difference and desire, Lacan proposes, can be graphed (fig. 4.16). The unconscious — the trickiest psychic terrain of all — is, finally, at a fundamental level, predicated on the reasoned order of the grid. This is because the unconscious, as an object of the science of psychoanalysis, is also an object of the science from which Lacanian psychoanalysis took its lead: linguistics. Moreover, psychic life — and, in effect, the affective economies that it governs — became in Lacan’s mind, at some level, the domain of scientistic modes of knowledge and reasoning. In this way, Lacan’s habits of mind followed Freud’s, as Althusser once explained in 1964.16 Lacan arrived at his scientisms predominantly through mathematics, specifically algebra — the branch of mathematics that reduces the solution of problems to manipulations of symbolic expressions. This kind of formalization allowed the psychoanalyst to claim for his practice the same sort of scientific status that Lévi-Strauss acquired for structural anthropology. And, more importantly, the formalizations of Lacan’s algebraic reasoning permit him to identify his own thinking with the symbolic order as opposed to those modes of

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4.14  The psychic apparatus. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900. 4.15  Jacques Lacan, The graph of desire, 1966. From Écrits: A Selection, by Jacques Lacan, translated by Alan Sheridan. Copyright © 1966 by Éditions du Seuil. English translation copyright © 1977 by Tavistock Publications. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Printed with the permission of Jacques-Alain Miller, custodian of the rights to the work of Jacques Lacan, under French law, March 11, 1957. 4.16  Jacques Lacan, The diagram of sexual difference, 1975. From Feminine Sexuality, by Jacques Lacan, edited by Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, translated by Jacqueline Rose. Copyright © 1982 by Jacqueline Rose. Copyright © 1966, 1968, 1975 by Éditions du Seuil. Copyright 1975 by Le Graphe. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Printed with the permission of Jacques-Alain Miller, custodian of the rights to the work of Jacques Lacan, under French law, March 11, 1957.

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knowledge — affective, perceptual, phenomenological, among them — that would appear to have a greater imaginary lure: that is, a capacity to seduce and, by extension, distort one’s thinking with illusions and misrecognitions, as opposed to the more carefully reasoned and self-conscious ways of formalized thought.17 In this way, we can call Lacan a conceptualist, even if an unadmitted and unwitting one. Lacan (not unlike Rosalind Krauss, as I detailed in the preceding chapter) turns away from one sort of visibility in order to secure a higher ground for his reasoning, or at least to find a representational strategy stripped of the obfuscations of desire. In fact, one of Lacan’s accomplishments is to have reinscribed the discursive sites where Freud turned toward science within the terms of the structuralist episteme of the day by, in effect, rewriting the early psychoanalytic questions about the human subject and the nature of the social order as an inquiry into the field and function of language itself, especially — and this point is absolutely essential — at a historic moment when the study of language was purported to be a new and all-encompassing science of the social.18 This peculiar positionality of at once turning away (from the autonomy and mastery of the subject defined as conscience and will, author of his acts and ideas) and at the same time surreptitiously turning back (toward a new affective investment in another kind of dis-affective mastery and antiillusionistic illusionism) is an important piece of the broader governing fantasy that I, in the first chapter of this book, refer to as the dream of the information world. Nonetheless, we know that Lacan’s attachment to science was still ambivalent, certainly in more ways than my inquiry into Post-Partum Document requires of our understanding. At a minimum, we must be sure to heed his tone in those moments when he adopts such modes of reasoning, for sometimes that tone is provisional; at other times, it is parodic. In fact, Lacan’s diagrams and schemas are rarely as univocal as they appear: they are “created to allow a hundred and one different readings,” he says, “a multiplicity that is admissible as long as the spoken remains caught in its algebra”— which is to say, as long as the spoken remains bound by the constraints of the symbolic.19 His schemata, diagrams, and mathemes are “a way of fixing our ideas, called for by an infirmity in our discursive capacity.”20 Even Lacan’s own use of these forms cannot convey some critical concepts, despite his well-known capacity for discursive acrobatics. He had to invent other forms that could accommodate notions too difficult even for words.

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4.17  Jacques Lacan, Schema L, 1966. From The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, by Jacques Lacan, translated by Sylvia Tomaselli. Copyright © 1978 by Éditions du Seuil. English translation copyright © 1988 by Cambridge University Press. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Printed with the permission of Jacques-Alain Miller, custodian of the rights to the work of Jacques Lacan, under French law, March 11, 1957.

So let us now look, for example, at Lacan’s Schema L from 1966 (fig. 4.17). The Schema L indicates the crossing of the imaginary and the symbolic, that is, the notion that we can’t get to the symbolic order except by way of the imaginary — by becoming captivated by it and identifying with it. The subject, designated by an “S” in the upper-left corner, is the subject not yet “symbolically castrated” by language.21 That subject is in an imaginary relationship to the image (“a1”), denoted across from it, which produces the subject’s egoic identification (“a”), and permits him to procure the symptoms, memories, and proto-narratives which make up his own history. “He sees himself in a, and that is why he has an ego,” Lacan explains. “He may believe that this ego is him, everybody is at that stage, and there is no way of getting out of it.”22 The imaginary, Lacan insists, profoundly and fundamentally conditions our being. The Schema L also aims to diagram the production of the subject of the symbolic order. That subject is a being who lacks being and is designated by an “S” under erasure. It does not show up within the quadrature because it is by nature unlocatable — nowhere and, properly speaking, no one. It is “deferred,” as the poststructuralists love to say, “gone” because the word has absented it.23 It emerges in the dialectic between the “S” and the Other (designated by “A” for “Autre” or “O” for “Other”). But don’t confuse the Other, Lacan warns, for “a fellow man”— that would be to revert to Panofsky’s scenario, the one that Robert Morris challenged, as I discuss in

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chapter 2. Rather, the big “O” indicates the condition structurally necessary for there to be a speaker of language in the first place.24 “The Other must first of all,” he insists, “be considered a locus, the locus in which speech is constituted.”25 It designates a radical alterity beyond the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot — or so Lacan insists — be assimilated through identification. It is the nowhere and nothing beyond the grid, which makes possible the suspension of structure itself. It is, as he puts it elsewhere, the other side of the “wall of language”: the structuring absence that buoys the system of language.26 But what matters here is not so much the way in which Lacan’s discourse leans on scientisms, but the significance of that leaning for an artwork so thoroughly wrought in Lacanian terms. For when, in the “Introduction” to Post-Partum Document, Kelly inscribed Lacan’s Schema L in stages across the front of four of her son’s small, carefully folded vests, as if one could track each of the internal dynamics one by one, or as if something of the tiny vests’ distinctions could be foretold by the self-rendering diagram — Kelly did not invoke the Lacanianism in order to subsume her work into its narrative or rhetoric (fig. 4.18). Like the Schema L, the vests, displayed as they are inside Perspex cases, are ordered, as materials of the archive or the laboratory. Yet they are not without their disruptive, individuating differences: variations in color; distinctions in the placement of the ties; the particular affective charge of a wrinkle; the shrunken shape of one vest; the turned-up edge of another. The “Introduction” oscillates between the sterility of a specimen and the affective charge of a memento, between the alienation of information and the longing of a document. It is an odd coupling — Mary’s grief and Lacan’s science. Odd because it is surprising to find one inscribed upon the other. It is this oddity that I hope to make sense of for what it reveals about the imbrication of affect with aesthetic and theoretical conceptualisms. On the one hand, there are the vests as markers of separation and the loss that separation entails (as the cross-chested design of the vests serve particularly in the period of healing following the cutting of the umbilical cord). And, on the other, there is the schema that attempts to make good that loss by inscribing their materiality within a language that appears to be impermeable to loss itself — a language that has already lost too much to lose anything more. After all, the rhetoric of the schema is one that depends upon its bareness, its having been pared of all obfuscating and illusory excess. In effect, the “Introduction” to Post-Partum Document is at least as scientistic as some

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4.18  Mary Kelly, PostPartum Document, “Introduction,” 1973, 4 of 4 units. Perspex unit, white card, wool vests, pencil, ink. 4 units, 20 × 25.5 cm each. Eileen Norton, Santa Monica. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the artist.

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of Lacan’s own diagrams. It is at least as scientistic as any of the diagrams that Kelly incorporates into the work — inclusive of the provocative figure Kelly adopted to introduce “Documentation V: Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index” (fig. 4.19): a diagram drawn from D. W. Thompson’s 1969 text, On Growth and Form, representing “the Cartesian co-ordinates applied to the known pelvic outline of Archaeopteryx (ancient bird) with the co-ordinates of the pelvis of Apatornis superimposed on it and three intermediate systems interpolated to give the hypothetical types leading up to Apatornis” (fig. 4.20).27 This diagram purports to track the transformation of the pelvis of one ancient bird into that of another — to mathematize their relation. Kelly has transformed the nature of its complexity, the locus of its import and, most significantly, the way in which desire and affect function with respect to its representational means.

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Moreover, what is hyperbolically cerebral about Post-Partum Document (and remember, the “Introduction” is but a warm-up; it is in fact economical and restrained in its intellectualism compared to the rest of the work) are the rhetorics that Kelly relies upon: the codes she invents, the methods of labeling, graphing, ordering, and archiving that she invokes, all of which become increasingly difficult to keep up with as they take us further and further from what we ordinarily think of as the labor of motherhood. PostPartum Document tells us something that Lacan works hard to keep under wraps: complexity itself, scientism itself, and hyperbolic cerebralism are themselves generative of affect. Certainly, as the psychoanalyst himself maintains, the mother “punctuates” her child’s expressions.28 And yes, as psychoanalysis suggests, she does bring them into discourse. And furthermore, affect, Kelly tells us, miming Lacan, can be rendered mathematical. The life of desire can be stripped, theorized, submitted to scientific clas-

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4.19  Mary Kelly, PostPartum Document, “Documentation V: Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index,” 1977. Installation view, Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1998. Perspex units, white card, wood, paper, ink, mixed media, 36 units, 13 × 18 cm each. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. © Generali Foundation. Photo: Werner Kaligofsky. Courtesy of the artist.

4.20  Mary Kelly, detail of Post-Partum Document, “Documentation V: Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index,” 1977, with diagram, “The Cartesian co-ordinates applied to the known pelvic outline of Archaeopteryx (ancient bird) with the co-ordinates of the pelvis of Apatornis superimposed on it and three intermediate systems interpolated to give the hypothetical types leading up to Apatornis,” from D. W. Thompson, On Growth and Form, 1969. Paper, ink, 13 × 18 cm. 1 of 36 units, black-and-white photograph. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the artist.

After Words

sification — and so Kelly gives up her son’s clothes as a case study for the Schema L. But the reverse is also true. Although in its rhetorics Kelly’s work might appear to entrench that “euphoric dream of scientificity,” it will only do so if we as viewers remain caught up in its misrecognitions, and fail to catch on to all of the ways in which Post-Partum Document disrupts that dream as well.29 Just when we (like Lacan, like Krauss) thought that we had found a way to immunize ourselves to the lure of the imaginary, it casts its spell over the most dry and calculating forms. The symbolic — w ith all its lawful scientisms, abstractions, and informationalizations — seduces us, symptomatizes through us, and grips us with its promise of a masterful dis-affection. And being in its grips, we forget the powerful affect of this dis-affection. This, Post-Partum Document wants us to see, was not only structuralism’s symptom, but also the symptom of a world picture and a politics with which the visual arts became critically engaged for a time.

Being After Several years have passed now for the child, his mother, and her work of art. It takes the five-year-old boy more than a couple of tries to pair his inscription of his first name with that of his last. At the top of the final of the fifteen slates his mother prepared for the very last installment of PostPartum Document, titled “Documentation VI: Prewriting Alphabet, Exergue and Diary” (1978), the child marks out his first name (figs. 4.21 and 4.22). And then again, below that first effort, he writes the letters once more: “K – e – l – l – y,” proudly and well practiced. This time he follows that inscription with the large letter “B”— the very first letter he has “constructed,” his mother documents, “with the express purpose of writing a specific word — his surname.” Having fumbled a first attempt, he starts anew with the capital letter “K.” But this time he follows it with the letter “l,” forgetting “e,” the letter he calls “the ‘curvy one,’” the one he has already mastered in learning to write it right-side up; the one, or so his mother tells us, about which he inquires, “What’s that?” when he sees it, just as when he sees a present or a breast. “Something at once lost, forgotten, remembered and hoped for. ‘ə’ as in ‘me,’ ” the mother replies, as if in internal dialogue, suggesting with one small word both the loss of something of the child’s imaginary identity (moi) and, at the same, the loss of the mother herself (“me”). Soon enough he gets it right. “Kelly Barrie.” Having assumed the name

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4.21  Mary Kelly, PostPartum Document, “Documentation VI: Prewriting Alphabet, Exergue and Diary,” 1978, 18 units. Installation view, Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1998. Perspex unit, white card, resin, slate, 18 units, 28 × 35.5 cm each. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London. © Generali Foundation. Photo: Werner Kaligofsky. Courtesy of the artist.

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of the father, signification can now proceed normally — or so the theory goes. The subject has acceded to his given identity by being named and positioned within the symbolic order. And, as Lacan argues, taking the name of the father ( le nom du père ) also signifies a submission to the Oedipal prohibition ( le non du père ): the “no” of the father that is also the “no” of incest prohibition, the turning away from his mother and the particular kinds of signification she makes available. The father, in his symbolic capacity, intervenes in the imaginary dyadic relationship between mother and child, introducing a symbolic distance between them. “b is for balloon,” begins the exergue portion of this last unit of the final Documentation. That is to say, before “B” is for Barrie, “B” was for balloon. The sentence recalls the rhetoric of children’s books, which rely for their efficacy on associative kinds of meaning. That is to say, “B” could be for many things, even many things all at once (balloon, ball, bottle, baby,

4.22  Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, “Documentation VI, Prewriting Alphabet, Exergue and Diary,” 1978, 1 of 18 units. Perspex unit, white card, resin, slate, 18 units, 28 × 35.5 cm each. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London. © Generali Foundation. Photo: Werner Kaligofsky. Courtesy of the artist.

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and boy), and children are wont to call up the things they have affective attachments to. But here, B is just for balloon, pure and simple. As the artist puts it in the introductory notes to this Documentation, the signified has undergone a “certain coagulation” that reflects the “logocentric bias of the system of language to which the letter ultimately subscribes. . . .” From now on — or so we are meant to believe — meaning will no longer be dispersed and ambiguated. Even the children’s books are in on this master plan. And in a certain sense, nor will it have been dispersed and ambiguated now that the letter “subscribes” to just one thing, which, we are told, was for the child’s practice of writing never a balloon, but always-already his surname. “B” is the first letter, in fact, to have been fully laden with this decidedness, this ability to neutralize and equalize the variety and affect of the more unruly forms of signification that have been proper to the other letters the child has been working on up until now. Surnames, it seems, are a special kind of word with very special effects. Within and beyond “Documentation VI,” there is a contradiction implicit in Kelly’s efforts to record her child’s emergence into language and the social order — a contradiction that the artist wants us to see as implicitly ascribed to us all. As the child makes his entry into the symbolic order — mastering his body, mastering his marks, mastering language, and being mastered by them all — he is retroactively marked as always-already having been there, always-already a subject, having forgotten and effaced all that came before. Of course, it is language and the institutions for which it speaks that have produced this effect within him, but the boy’s behavior evinces the fact just as well. He has become “quite happy” at school; he can even stay for dinner, says his father to his mother. In more ways than one, the child has left behind his “incipient agraphia,” as his mother calls it: the gaps, omissions, affects, and inversions in his prewriting alphabet, the upside-down “e,” the unhappy “c” that is not an “o,” but is missing something, like “an o feeling sorry for itself.” And in this moment when he turns toward subjection, he also, in a perceptible shift, turns away from all of this that preceded it. Now he proclaims that “his dad’s name is Ray Barrie and his mum’s is just Mary.” It is a gesture of not only claiming his father’s last name as his own, but also of taking his first name, which is his mother’s last, away from her, as if not to let her have his name any longer. Recall, one final time, Althusser’s individual who becomes a subject. “There are individuals walking along,” he narrates, as if the process were as incidental and quotidian as anything else. And then it happens, from

After Words

“somewhere (usually behind them) the hail rings out: ‘Hey, you there!’ One individual (nine times out of ten it is the right one) turns around, believing / suspecting knowing that it is for him, i.e. recognizing that ‘it really is he’ who is meant by the hailing.”30 And in the moment described by Althusser in this way, the individual answers the call; in a “mere onehundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion,” he is subjected. Yet, in fact, Althusser goes on to say, we can hardly catch him in this moment. He admits that it is “for the convenience and clarity of my little theoretical theatre [that] I have had to present things in the form of a sequence, with a before and an after, and thus in the form of a temporal succession.” Ideology itself, we have been told, does not let us see this turning. Here is the famous passage: As ideology is eternal, I must now suppress the temporal form in which I have presented the functioning of ideology, and say: ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects, which amounts to making it clear that individuals are always-already interpellated by ideology as subjects, which necessarily leads us to one last proposition: individuals are always-already subjects. Hence individuals are “abstract” with respect to the subjects, which they always-already are.31

However, contrary to Althusser’s claim, the turn is perceptible within Post-Partum Document. In fact, perceiving the child’s subjection is the very thing the work of art has been charged to do, as is making an account of the “abstraction” that is the child before this “moment” arrives. Throughout Post-Partum Document, Kelly conceives of this turning around also as a “turning away.” More than once she calls it “weaning.” Her son is not just “weaned” from his mother’s breast; he is also “weaned from the holophrase” (“Documentation II: Analyzed Utterances and Related Speech Events”) as well as “weaned from the dyad” (“Documentation III: Analyzed Markings and Diary-perspective Schema”). By this term, Kelly would seem to suggest that we can perceive the very process of our “being thrown,” and she sets out to see the subtractions and departures that interpellation entails and, in effect — as Althusser insists — elides. And if this is so — contrary to what the dominant accounts have had us believe — then the suggestion follows: we might conceive of the entry into the symbolic order as less terminal, not determined by such delimited notions of temporality as ante- or post-partum, and still very much wrought by an order of sense that does not give way to the always-already, and a kind of inscription, as

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Paul Smith has similarly wondered, that is not a discourse.32 This sense would not be shaped by the systematicity and all-at-once-ness of structural order — the idea, as Lacan frames it, that “the whole thing holds together,” which is ultimately what forces the suppression Althusser speaks of.33 As Gilles Deleuze remarked in 1967, drawing on Lévi-Strauss before him, structural order and its temporal predicament necessarily entail that “sense always results from the combination of elements that are not themselves signifying.” He continues: “For structuralism . . . there is always too much sense, an overproduction, an overdetermination of sense, always produced in excess by the combination of places in the structure.” To his point: “Nonsense is not at all the absurd or the opposite of sense, but rather that which gives value to sense and produces it by circulating in the structure.”34 Ultimately, my examination of Post-Partum Document wants to illuminate what, for lack of a better word, Deleuze calls “non-sense,” which is another way of naming the marks that the child makes on his way to language, another way of thinking about the “abstraction” that “precedes” the child’s subjection. But first our interest must be in exposing the very predicament of belatedness that characterizes structuralism’s account of the subject and any experience of meaning available to him or her. In one sense, this is where Post-Partum Document positions its subjects. Most readily and already, the work puts the child’s father there; quite imminently, his son will be there too; and most importantly, Mary Kelly is in a position of being after in a way that is particular to her historical moment and the possibilities for identity formation, both feminist and conceptualist, available at that time. Still, in more ways than this Post-Partum Document is, as it were, after words. The work is not just on its way to being after the child’s first words, it is also — being the year 1973 — after conceptualism and its pronounced aftermath. Furthermore, Post-Partum Document emerged within, alongside, and out of structuralist thought, which itself is in the position of being always-after, or, to put it as Étienne Balibar has, “structuralism . . . [is] a practice of immanent externality”— the thought of being outside.35 In sum, Post-Partum Document is marked through and through by the prefix that stands titularly over it: “post.” And like both Mary Kelly and her son, the work wrestles with this pastness and passivity, and with the claim that so much of its material (like so many of the child’s utterances) does not speak for itself but is instead “spoken” because, as the structuralists like to say, the conditions of production are always external to the work and its au-

After Words

thor, because those conditions exceed and precede them by being internal to the institutions into which their being and meaning have been thrown.

Being Thrown When Mary Kelly took up the conceptualist idiom, she was actually turning back to it as it had already been mobilized and, according to dominant accounts, exhausted by many artists before her. These days one hardly needs to recall the rhetoric of failure that developed in the wake of the emergence of conceptualism, by which time it had become evident that many of the pressures propelling that emergence had not been relieved. By 1973 the dream of an art that could be freed from materiality, more capable of communication, and reclaimed by the structures of an anti-optical aesthetic seemed to have disappointed even those critics who had previously equated it with political change.36 Suffice it to say, there are familiar statements with familiar names to go with them, each detailing conceptualism’s shortfall.37 This narrative now seems to come hitched to scholarly accounts of conceptual art, always accompanying our thinking about the practice — like the tail follows the dog. This discourse of failure positions us as viewers yet further from the work, as if always looking back upon it. As is the case with so many discourses of the end, we are, in this sense, always after conceptualism. On our behalf, so that we can know more about our own standing, Mary Kelly takes up this position as well. Thus, Post-Partum Document makes us viewers not only of the child’s prospective growth and development, but also of Kelly’s retrospective vantage of her own thrownness into the presumptions of a discursive identity shaped by particular aesthetic and political commitments that she came to adopt as her own. By the early 1970s, alongside her interest in conceptualist rhetorics, Kelly had also become deeply involved with the National Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain, which found direction and purpose in psychoanalytic paradigms. The group of activists with which Kelly was associated was called the “History Group,” formed by Juliet Mitchell and Rosalind Delmar, and included Laura Mulvey and Sally Alexander. “We wanted to address the problem of representation, the representation of women, as it appeared in the media. And we thought that consciousness raising alone was not enough, that you needed something like psychoanalysis to understand what we called the subjective moment of wom-

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4.23  Mary Kelly, PostPartum Document, “Documentation V: Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index,” 1977. Detail of installation view, Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1998. Perspex units, white card, wood, paper, ink, mixed media, 36 units, 13 × 18 cm each, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. © Generali Foundation. Photo: Werner Kaligofsky. Courtesy of the artist.

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en’s oppression.”38 As the discourse of specimens grows thicker within Post-Partum Document — from first phonemes to first objects, from fecal stains through the evolution of the child’s graphic symbolizations — it is often not the boy, but Mary Kelly — feminist, conceptual artist, and new mother — who is offered up as its case study. With this in mind, let us return to a time before the child could spell his name. In July 1976, about one month before her son’s third birthday, the artist began work on “Documentation V: Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index” (fig. 4.23). Here she archives specimens, such as a leaf or a beetle, saved by the child during his investigations of everyday life, which at this time coincided with his early questions about sexuality: “Mummy, where’s your willy?” “Where does your wee come from?” Or “Why don’t I have a baby?” And her lacunal answers: “I haven’t got one. I’m a girl and you’re a boy. You’re like Daddy. You two have got one and I don’t.” Kelly opens the Documentation by remarking that the concurrence of these two “researches”— specimen and inquiry — are directed by the child to his mother: the former as gift, the lat-

After Words

ter as a question usually about the mother’s body or the child’s in relation to hers. These researches comprise, as she says, “a set of discursive events” represented in three sections: first, in the form of the archived specimen mounted on a pinning block, dated, and taxonomically identified; second, as a photocopied reproduction of the specimen accompanied by the text of Kelly’s questions and set in the grid of a proportional diagram intended to recall Thompson’s diagram of superimposed coordinate systems and the theory of transformations that is based on it. And finally, in the “Statistical Tables and Index,” Kelly adds a fragment of a diagram of a pregnant body accompanied by a list of terms taken from the index of a medical text that details that body. The Index begins in this way: abdomen— abdominal cavity, abdominal delivery, abdominal muscles, abdominal pregnancy, abnormal pregnancy, abortion— incomplete abortion, septic abortion, spontaneous abortion, therapeutic abortion, afterbirth, afterpains, amniocentesis, amnion, amniotic fluid, anaemia, anaesthesia, anaesthetic, anal fissure, ankles swelling, ante-natal, ante-partum, anus, areola, artificial insemination.

The events represented by this Documentation make their most narrativized and unmistakably discursive appearance at the conclusion of the Documentation in “Experimentum Mentis V: On the Order of Things.” There, in a voice that is at once Foucault’s, Lacan’s, and a subtle parody of both, the artist describes from the third-person point of view “the mother’s relation to castration, to the Father and the Law,” and explains how it is “called into question by the sexual researches of [the] child.” The “Experimentum Mentis” tells the story of the child’s recognition of the mother’s sexual difference, the mother’s subsequent development of an unconscious sense of shame, the reprieve of the Father’s promise that takes the form of a baby, the child’s ultimate concession that indeed the mother does not have the phallus, and, finally, his adoption of the masculine position and heterosexual imperative. The discourse through which the castration complex is detailed is, as many have argued before, an exceedingly anatomizing one.39 Symbolic losses are made more urgent, and at the same time they are affectively managed, by rendering them bodily. This is to say that anatomizing does the more insidious and ideological work of assigning these losses to particular bodies, and protecting other bodies from them. It is also the case that this discourse steals the body not just from the mother but more immediately from the child by making over his use of it into a discursive one.

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Yet even though Mary Kelly is well aware of the ways in which culture and the field of experience are coextensive — the ways in which bodies, insofar as they inhabit subject positions, are reduced to “the local embodiment of ideology”— “Documentation V” records, above all else, that the mother and child do not adapt so easily to the omniscience of the psychoanalytic master-narrative.40 The “Experimentum Mentis” closes the Documentation, as if to sum it all up. Yet, in spite of the gravity of its discourse, Kelly makes it resonate rather like noise around the rest of the Documentation. After all it is but a mental experiment, a discourse with which to manage an experience. But beyond this discourse — or perhaps I should say “before” it — the boy won’t let his mother forget the often-neglected terrain of what Brian Massumi has called “the real-material-but-incorporeal,” by which he means “the transitional immediacy of a real relation — [such as] that of a body to its own indeterminacy (its openness to an elsewhere and otherwise than it is, in any here and now.)” In other words, bodies are meaningful in ways that exceed the culturally constructed significations that the grid of the symbolic order provides. The problem is that this other repressed terrain has been figured as, or rather disappeared into, the gap between the positions on the grid. Massumi — as I earlier noted — eloquently calls this forgotten space “the space of the crossing,” one that itself “falls into a theoretical no-body’s land.”41 Another way of saying this is that in spite of its anatomizing tendencies — the way in which discourse is written on bodies and as bodies — the “Experimentum Mentis V” reminds us that bodies don’t matter before, beyond, or even within discourse.42 They are excessive; their traces a byproduct that can’t be used by the system. In “Documentation I: Analyzed Fecal Stains and Feeding Charts,” we see this idea precisely. There the mother takes her very first specimen from the infant’s fecal stains left behind on his diaper liners, over which she types his daily feeding schedule (fig. 4.24). At this moment, the infant cannot yet speak, draw, or write, but still, the mother is told, his excrement is a privileged “sign” of whether she is, or is not, fulfilling her function with respect to her “natural” capacity for maternity and child care. The artist offers her child’s excrement as his very first signifier, but the meaning of that substance can hardly be diagrammed or tracked by either the scientism of pediatrics or by structuralist methods, though those means would have us believe otherwise. What the boy’s bowels and his mother’s worries about them tell us, finally, is that even the language of information and codification represented by the

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chart of the pediatric text can’t quite wrap its grid around the signifying substance that is the child’s shit. By what means, then, will the mother read the relative viscosity, its homogeneity, the range of looseness or firmness, constipation or diarrheal state that the subject’s product exhibits? In short: how will she understand? The question seems absurd, abject even, but is no less profound. There is great attention and anxiety written all over the mother’s feeding records, although she has recruited all their means to keep that anxiety at bay. The excess of affect that seems to run, as it were, from the child’s rear end spills over into his mother’s attempts to organize what goes in, and in what form it makes its way back out of his body. It bears noting that Kelly’s typed records trope any number of other conceptual artworks including Hans Haacke’s 1971 Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a RealTime Social System, as of May 1, 1971, a project that investigated a system of planned impoverishment of urban neighborhoods by a group of realestate speculators (fig. 4.25); as well as the daily schedules included in a project titled Women and Work, produced between 1973 and 1975 by Kelly in collaboration with Kay Hunt and Margaret Harrison, and dedicated to tracking the impact of the 1970 Equal Pay Act in Britain on the division of labor in a factory in South London (fig. 4.26). Haacke’s real estate information and the work diaries included in Women and Work propose to do the work of making visible the injustices of particular invisible social practices through bare informational record — without actually picturing anything at all, as though to picture would necessarily be to obscure the facts or, worse, mislead. As with the body, so, too, with the visible. We are meant to believe that both must be, in large measure, suppressed. “Mummy,” the child questions some years later when his and her researches have come to be so much more complex than the comparatively simple task monitored in “Documentation I.” “Do you have a baby in your tummy?” When she tells him “no,” he announces that when he “get[s] big, [he] will give . . . Mummy a baby and when Daddy gets bigger he will have a baby.” “Boys don’t have babies,” his mother feels compelled to add, for it is her job to clarify for the child what the order of things truly is, even if she must run the risk of inducting him into a culture in which bodies mean something prescribed, in which they don’t mean within an imaginary that is beyond discourse. But usually her answers are more equivocating. “Show me,” the boy further commands of his mother, following her response to his query, “. . . where’s your willy?” But what he means is “show

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4.24  Mary Kelly, detail, Post-Partum Document, “Documentation I: Analyzed Fecal Stains and Feeding Charts,” 1974, 1 of 31 units. Perspex unit, white card, diaper linings, plastic, sheeting, paper, ink, 31 units, 28 × 35.3 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the artist.

me that you haven’t got one,” make manifest your denial and our difference. “Oh Kel . . . ,” her voice trails off, the censoring indicated by the ellipsis suggesting so many things at once: the mother’s hesitation to bring her child into discourse, her reservations about making a specimen of herself and positioning her own body within the category of lack (fig. 4.27). Her resistance must also be set up to keep discourse from wresting the body from its place within the child’s imaginary, “coagulating” its polymorphousness into a singular, fixed meaning; plotting it on the grid.43 If only the answers to the boy’s queries could be known, named, and conveyed as easily as Kelly names his collections — the Ranunculus acris or “buttercup,” as it is commonly called, found in late August on the canal wayside; or the garden snail, scientifically dubbed Helix aspersa, which the child picked up from a compost heap near the greenhouse (fig. 4.28). This portion of the Documentation, referred to as “L1 – 11: Mounted Specimens and Labels,” bears the definitive mark of a harder science: taxonomic classification with Latin names, authorial data, and abbreviations we can hardly decipher; entomological preservation complete with pinning blocks, administratively stamped with date and site information. Although these elements were improvised by Kelly, and are therefore marked by the idiosyncrasies of her 4.25 (opposite, top) Hans Haacke, detail of Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, 1971. Two maps (photo enlargements) black-and-white photographs; 142 typewritten sheets; 6 charts; one explanatory panel. Maps: 24 × 20 in. (61 × 50.8 cm); photographs: 10 × 8 in. (25.4 × 20.3 cm); typed sheets: 10 × 8 in. (25.4 × 20.3 cm); charts: 24 × 20 in. (61 × 50.8 cm); panel: 24 × 20 in. (61 × 50.8 cm). This exists in an edition of two. One of the two copies is in the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The other is jointly owned by MACBA in Barcelona and the Whitney Museum in New York. © Hans Haacke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. 4.26 (opposite, bottom) Mary Kelly, Margaret Harrison, and Kay Hunt, detail of daily schedules, Women and Work, 1973–75. Black-and-white photographs, charts, tables, photocopied documents, film loops, audiotapes, dimensions variable. Tate Modern, London. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of Mary Kelly. 

4.27  (opposite) Mary Kelly, “Research I,” from PostPartum Document, “Documentation V: Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index,” 1977, 1 of 36 units. Perspex unit, white card, ink, mixed media, 13 × 18 cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. © Mary Kelly. 4.28  Mary Kelly, “Classified Specimen,” from Post-Partum Document, “Documentation V: Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index,” 1977, 1 of 36 units. Perspex unit, white card, wood, paper, ink, mixed media, 13 × 18 cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia.

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handwriting and craft — and thus look more homemade than of the laboratory — still, they both anticipate and mime the eleven figures Kelly calls “Statistical Tables and Index.” That is to say, the bugs, leaves, and flowers come before the images of the scanned pregnant bodies within Post-Partum Document’s broader context, as well as after them — cast in the shadow of their discursive framework. But these are mere bugs and leaves; pinning them down doesn’t feel so bad. Seeing them subjected to taxonomic classification is not something we flinch at. In fact, scientism unleashed on the child’s gifts to his mother generates a surprising supplement of affect and care. These are the mother’s keepsakes; cataloging keeps them close at hand. So the child gives his mother an insect and, while not in the same moment, in the same vein he puts a question to her as if to investigate the otherness of her species. He conducts his investigation not fully understanding what or why he needs to know. What he does know is that something is upon him; some sort of knowledge is coming his way. This is because sexuality is retroactive or after the event, as Freud once explained, and the child is still many steps behind. Culture is too early — the discourse of sexual difference and its consequences are there before us, awaiting our arrival. They come too soon, for the child cannot yet think or feel within its framework. Biology is too late; it has, as Jean Laplanche explains, “fail[ed] to furnish the child with ‘affective’ and ‘ideational’ counterparts [that are] sufficient. . . .”44 In the meantime, the boy will look for those things in insects, in plant life, and in his mother’s body, as well as his own. But Post-Partum Document wants us to see something more about the child’s “researches,” just as it wants us to know much more than the discourses that it mobilizes are prepared to tell us. As the boy undertakes to study the forms of life both within and outside of the home, so, too, does his mother simultaneously keep her eye on him. In turn, their investigations are also self-reflexive. The questions at hand are not limited to What are you? Nor even What are you not? Nor What do you have that I don’t? Or more classically still: What have you not? The question that runs, albeit circuitously, throughout “Documentation V” is this: What am I? It is routed through all the talk of ghosts, snakes, spiders, and crabs, which the child fears live in his room. It leads him through the wooded area where the Peach Blossom lives, and it takes him to the garden just behind his house, where he picked up the Privit. What is this? What are you? But such beings make naming an easy task and, in effect, these questions are not so difficult

4.29  Mary Kelly, PostPartum Document, “Documentation V: Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index,” 1977, 1 of 36 units. Perspex unit, white card, ink, 13 × 18 cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the artist.

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to ask. But the question What am I? — this is of another order. While the boy seeks answers in other questions and in other forms of life, his mother poses this question algorithmically at the close of the Documentation, hemming in the whole of it with a single stark formula (fig. 4.29). If the child’s circuit of questioning is driven by the predicament of not knowing precisely what or of whom he is asking — being, as he is, too early still — the mother’s quandary is that she, on the contrary, knows all too well: she is too late. Accordingly, the uncertainty that marks her query is no less bounded by the assured and revered mode of framing provided by Lacan, which represents both her awareness of her confusion (for ideology is not enough) and the certainty of her “prearrangement.” “One of the effects of ideology,” writes Althusser, “is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological.’ ”45 But it is there just the same. The same affect management is at work in the figures that comprise the Documentation’s “Statistical Tables and Index.” Through sparse and anaesthetized alphabetized ordering, the Index endeavors to be comprehensive and at the same time disaffected, to account for but flatten such things as “bleeding,” “breathlessness,” “carcinoma,” “toxaemia” by hemming them in amidst a list of less frightening or simply more remote terms — “ergometrine,” “exercises,” “forgetfulness,” “frequency”— as if structuring the body, its functions and dysfunctions, according to the arbitrariness of the alphabet could make it more tolerable and, by extension, less a thing of affect and impending loss. The source material Kelly used for the Index is a book titled Dictionary of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Contraception, first published in 1971 and from which Kelly created the Index with a running list of the entries defined in the book.46 Like the Dictionary, the Index presents the disquieting pretense of having found a way to contain the body and its undoing. “nervousness, nightmares, nipples, . . . nose bleeds.” In turn, and unexpectedly, the Index refashions the body’s terrain: nerves, nipples, and noses line up next to one another. It is both the body we know and, at the same time, the body disfigured, disembodied. Through it, Kelly shows herself to be the subject of the very discourses she mobilizes. But what is distinctive in her mode of speaking them is that as she does so, she marks all the ways in which she feels herself spoken by them. “diuretic, daptone, douching, dry labour, fear of dying . . .” (fig. 4.30).

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4.30 (opposite) Mary Kelly, “Statistical Fig. 4b and Index D–E,” Post-Partum Document, “Documentation V: Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index,” 1977, detail, 1 of 36 units. Blackand-white photograph. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the artist.

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“ ‘The Body,’ ” Massumi writes in Parables for the Virtual. “What is it to The Subject?” What he means is not the discursive body — the one with “signifying gestures,” gestures that make and sometimes even “unmake” sense — but the comparatively unmediated one; the one that moves and senses; the one, as Judith Butler has similarly worried, that feels violence and pain, but whose experience of those things falls into the void spaces between signifying positions on the grid.47 I invoke here Massumi’s metaphor one last time to show how Kelly expands it for us. Above the Index, the artist adds a fragment of a diagram of a body scanned, after the manner in which the child investigates it, this time by the medical industry. The photocopied forms are set within the functionalist grid of medical practice, transforming the shape of a bladder or thigh or the bulge surrounding the umbilicus into the curves of familiar statistical tables of the sort that track such things as infant mortality, fetal growth, or intra-uterine temperature.48 By means of this undoing maneuver, the pregnant body is disturbingly dissected crosswise, laid out visibly, and then made to give over its corporeal contour to the grid as if we might actually be able to read those lines as signs of information. But nowhere can the body really appear without having already been effected by one discourse or another — not in the Statistical Tables, nor throughout the rest of “Documentation V.” How, then, do we ascertain the body that both mother and child feel slipping away to a greater voice; the body that is “open,” to recall Massumi’s words, “to an elsewhere and otherwise than it is, in any here and now?” We are able to see it only in the interstices of the mother-child dialogue: in the groping nature of the child’s questions and the uneven, haltingness of the mother’s answers. Perhaps we find it in what he imagines her to be “before” that imaginary is dissected by the symbolic, each body part put in its place. Even the tiny, alien bodies of the insects and flora found by the child are set within a grid. To record those beings, this time Kelly chooses the grid of a proportional diagram from D. W. Thompson’s 1917 classic, On Growth and Form, an expansive text that principally argues that structural order as opposed to evolution governs the form of living organisms. Kelly’s choice of pairing is fitting. Though their terrain and tone appear distant, Thompson’s inquiry resonates with the child’s questions. Like the child’s researches, Thompson’s investigation is comparative. How does the cannon-bone of a sheep derive from that of an ox or giraffe? How does the skull of the human relate to that of the chimpanzee (fig. 4.31)? What

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does the leaf of the begonia have to do with that of the hyacinth? Joining together mathematics with zoology and classical sources, Thompson famously suggests that differences in the forms of related animals could be described by means of simple mathematical transformations. Let us inscribe in a system of Cartesian coordinates the outline of an organism, however complicated, or a part thereof: such as a fish, a crab, or a mammalian skull. We may now treat this complicated figure, in general terms, as a function of x, y. If we submit our rectangular system to deformation on simple and recognised lines, altering, for instance, the direction of the axes, the ratio of x / y, or substituting for x and y some more complicated expressions, then we obtain a new system of coordinates, whose deformation from the original type the inscribed figure will precisely follow. In other words, we obtain a new figure which represents the old figure under a more or less homogeneous strain, and is a function of the new coordinates in precisely the same way as the old figure was of the original coordinates x and y.49

It was in the symbolic order of mathematics that Thompson found his solution to the challenge “of recognising in one form a definite permutation or deformation of another.” Specifically, he looked to the Theory of Transformations, itself reliant on the Method of Coordinates whose purpose when Descartes originally conceived of it was “no more than to find a way of translating the form of a curve (as well as the position of a point) into numbers and into words.”50 This “frame of reference,” as Kelly punningly identifies her mobilization of the Method of Coordinates, literally framing

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4.31 (a & b)The inscription of a human skull and of the skull of a chimpanzee in the Cartesian coordinates. Reprinted from On Growth and Form, by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, edited by John Tyler Bonner. © 1961 Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

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the boy’s findings within the armature of the grid and, at once, calling up Thompson’s tremendous reference, is significant not least because the Theory of Transformations still survives, Kelly reminds us, “at the level of social mythology . . . with regard to the derivative nature of female anatomy.”51 That is to say, the heterogeneity of feminine sexuality is repressed within the dominant discourse of sexual difference. She is but a transformation, a deformation, as it were, of the male. The female is merely a function of coordinates derived from those used to describe her counterpart. And so the child asks, not yet knowing what his question entails but still wanting to make the comparison himself: “Mummy, where’s your willy?” “Will the badmen come and cut [mine] off?” But here, finally, is my point. These grids, contours, curves, and graphs, these relations drawn through elongated, reduced, or otherwise torqued frames, are mere analogies within Post-Partum Document. They are but modes of wanting to know, like so many attempts to represent a predicament that nevertheless exceeds their grasp. For me, that predicament comes into clearer view after looking again and again at Kelly’s quotation of Thompson’s diagram, the way it stands quietly and esoterically before the rest of “Documentation V,” not knowing what it wants but still announcing with its gaping middle and twisting, warping framework that something similar is about to happen to the boy and his mother, something that it wants to calculate by its very form. Of course, in truth, this cannot be so. But the suggestion is there all the same. And so — on some level, then, that diagram, like the whole of Post-Partum Document, is simply groping for a way to represent a transaction, to make imaginable a relation.

Being With, or Affectivity after Difference In an essay written for the catalogue of the 1995 exhibition Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965 – 1975, Stephen Melville describes the sort of relation that conceptualism, in its initial iteration, yearned for. To take up Conceptualism, as an historical or critical object or as one’s own practice, as a movement of sorts is to understand it as moved by a broadly political desire — a desire for a renegotiation or overcoming of a presumed gap between art and life, and a desire for a community or socius not ordered by the terms and practices that currently govern our practices. . . . [T]he underlying political fantasy dreams of a telepathic community — say, a community that is

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not riven by the fact of beholding and so one in which work is not defined by its ability to engender an audience.52

Telepathy provides Melville with a model of an unmediated relationality, one capable of getting around the matter of institutions, language, and ideology. It must have been Jack Burnham, if not Robert Barry, who supplied Melville with the term. In 1970 Burnham wrote, “Conceptual art’s ideal medium is telepathy.”53 That was one year after Barry produced Telepathic Piece for the exhibition May 19 – June 19, 1969, held for those dates at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Representing the work was a bracketed statement printed in the exhibition catalogue: “During the exhibition I will try to communicate telepathically a work of art, the nature of which is a series of thoughts that are not applicable to language or image.” From an auditorium at the exhibition site, Barry’s audience put questions to him and to Lawrence Weiner, Douglas Huebler, and Joseph Kosuth, who were also included in the show. Remotely, Barry made his attempt at a telepathic (though unschooled) response from Seth Siegelaub’s apartment. “I just tried to get my thoughts together about what I was feeling at the time . . . [,] to concentrate on what it was and for however long I could do it.”54 The work of art beamed quietly and invisibly between minds. One can only imagine that Barry and many of his contemporaries fancied that telepathy, or at least its aesthetic counterpart, could make certain gains for the work of art and the subjects it imagined, even if in that hyperbolic and mostly-in-jest sort of way that has characterized much conceptual work and, in effect, made for artworks that we take in quickly and then turn from because they appear to invite more laughter than serious attention. I do not mean to suggest that Barry truly believed in the viability of telepathy; rather, the work stands in for an ironic expression of that “broadly political desire” of which Melville speaks — this time hoped for in a desperate way with failure already implicit in the hoping. Despite the implication of the work’s tone and its maker’s intention, what Telepathic Piece does not account for is that while relinquishing the mediation of ideology and its institutions, it also sacrifices the materiality of communicative exchange. By thinning the work of art, Barry attenuates the very structure of relating, ridding it of its affects. It seems to me that the telepathic fantasy provided, in its historical moment, an antidote to the ever-presence of the symbolic or at least to an everpresent attention to the ways in which the symbolic presents itself — that

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“ ‘bad dream,’ ” as Robert Smithson says, “that has somehow consumed the world.”55 I said earlier that Lacan’s Schema L had lost so much, it could not lose anything more. Leave it to Barry to find a way to strip things further, to disappear them almost altogether — while still hoping to retain a community or at least forge a connection. Kelly, on the other hand, remained faithful to her attention to the symbolic, sharpened it further to become, like so many of her contemporaries, yet more amorous of the father-grid, in the hopes that such a practice might help her see her way through it. Yet at the same time, Post-Partum Document also seeks to reimagine the community or socius not by the attenuation of its constituents — as if we could be lifted up and out of the system as well as the body itself. In PostPartum Document we are asked, through the noise of the symbolic, to see the “abstraction” that is the subject before subjection: the “non-sensical,” phenomenal excess left behind as he becomes a part of that very social order. And it is in reading that material that Kelly attends not just to the predicament of being after, but also the conditions for being with. In the foreword to the book version of Post-Partum Document, Lucy Lippard figures the work as “the story of a cultural kidnapping and a woman’s passive resistance to it, made active by verbal and visual analysis.”56 It is clear that this so-called “kidnapping” is something that the structural order does to the child. The grid of the symbolic slowly, readily steals him from his mother and the dyadic world that she offers and represents, which is eventually effaced by culture once the child is firmly articulated within it. In turn, and only then, Mary Kelly is made a “mother”— as the last words of the final unit of the sixth Documentation tells us when the artist’s friend says to her, as if to speak for the voice of the symbolic itself, “your [sic] a real mother now.” However — as I’ve sought to make clear here — t his is only the most apparent reading of Post-Partum Document, the one that has dominated accounts of the work since its production. It is the one that Lippard quickly picked up on because the din of that discourse can’t help but be heard throughout the work. Indeed, Kelly tells her story as if through this chatter. Like a good feminist, she follows the dominant discourse to its end, at which point her son takes up the very order of representation proper to it, just as she watches herself lose her grip on it. Kelly could even be said to have performed something of the “paternal function” on her child — conflictually at times, parodically at others — believing that such a method

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could expose the myth of motherhood, even if at the expense of further entrenching the myth of the symbolic.57 The other side to this story is that the child is not only taken from the mother; the mother is also taken from the child. Another way of saying this is that a particular intersubjective possibility is foreclosed to the child and with it a kind of subjective and intersubject experience is disappeared. This is not at all to say that the reading represented by Lippard is not there in the work and need not be maintained. Indeed, Post-Partum Document makes most apparent Kelly’s profound attachment to thinking within and being thought by the terms of the symbolic. After all, to withdraw one’s affection from that discourse would also be to make an undesirable (and impossible) return to an essentialism of the first order; it would be to reject one of the most promising lessons of the antihumanist turn: that identity — being based on difference rather than sameness — is in many ways structured like a language, and knowing this has helped to expose and resist the politics of a hegemonic culture. But Kelly makes visible that language itself is also in excess of the system. Or to put it as the child’s mother does: before the letter “B” came to stand for Barrie, before the signifier was insisted upon, “X”— she writes in the first unit of “Documentation VI”— was for “X” (fig. 4.32). Look at the child’s early attempts to mark out the alphabet as he approaches the brink of fully becoming a subject of the symbolic order, right when the knife, so to speak, is about to fall. Take notice especially of his production of x’s and o’s in this period when the written mark still hovers between mere trace and cultural sign. The artist notes in her exergue, written beneath a field of her son’s cross-marks: (age 3.5) x is for x. He calls it “a cross.” He substitutes different letter names for the same marks. It seems to mean writing in general. X is arbitrary but not indifferent. X is the body — repressed, represented, enjoyed. x is for alligators x-ing x’s. x is for a xenurus having a x-ray. good night little x. xenophon xerxes xephosura. good night little x.

“X is arbitrary but not indifferent.” The signifier may have no bound or “motivated” relation to its signified, as Saussure long ago argued, but it still matters deeply, Kelly rejoins, to the subject who writes. That mode of mattering, of being meaningful in an affective way — i.e., not indifferent — has

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4.32  Mary Kelly, “x is for x . . .” Unit, Post-Partum Document, “Documentation VI: Prewriting Alphabet, Exergue and Diary,” 1978, 1 of 18 units. Perspex unit, white card, resin, slate, 10 × 15.5 cm each, Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the artist.

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come to seem mutually exclusive with the mode of arbitrariness, perhaps the most cherished quality of life within the system because it is the one that makes the system visible as such and untethers the structural field from substance as well as matter. “The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary,” insists Saussure and so many of his followers. By this he means and is careful to point out that “the term should not imply that the choice of the signifier is left entirely to the speaker . . . I mean that it is unmotivated, i.e. arbitrary in that it actually has no natural connection with the signified.” He elaborates: “The idea of ‘sister’ is not linked by any inner relationship to the succession of sounds s-ö-r which serves as its signifier in French. . . .”58 The same, of course, could be said of “m‑o‑t‑h‑e‑r,” “f‑a‑t‑h‑e‑r,” and “s‑o‑n.” And, by extension, it is the principle of the arbitrary that sets into motion the function and centrality of difference for a theory of language and culture after Saussure. For it is not just the case that signs can never fully summon forth their meaning; they also can only be taken as meaningful through an appeal to additional words, from which they, significantly, differ. As discussed in the preceding chapter, the principle of the arbitrariness of the signifier is also insisted upon by Krauss in her expanded field intervention. “Sculpture . . . had become pure negativity . . . , had ceased being a positivity . . . [it] had become a kind of ontological absence. . . .”59 Difference, in fact, is the operative mechanism of the expanded field. Like Krauss, who looked to structural difference as the antidote to so much talk of “pluralism” in the 1970s, so, too, does Craig Owens in his 1983 essay “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” where he argues the case for bringing sexual difference to bear on the modernism / postmodernism debate. “Pluralism, however,” he writes there, “reduces us to being an other among others; it is not a recognition, but a reduction to difference to absolute indifference, equivalence, interchangeability.”60 Notably, for Owens, the structuralist principle of difference has become a figure of sorts, one that transfigures by being linguistically transformed over and again throughout the course of his essay. In writing about sexual difference, he refers to “our sensitivity to differences”; “difference without” and “difference within”; both “scandalously in-different” and “complete indifference,” as well as “thinking altogether differently.”61 And if Owens has a point — if there is meaning to his rhetorical twists and turns — it is to

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suggest that the call for a discourse of difference emerged out of a culture of “complete indifference”— specifically to formerly valued and respected distinctions between notions like “the original” and “the copy,” “authenticity” and “inauthenticity,” and so on. 62 We have become passive, disaffected — i.e., indifferent — to such differences. Conversely, for Kelly — even as one of the artists whose work fuels Owens’s polemic — indifference is, rather, the affect that dominates the new discursive culture that has come to privilege difference above all else. Hence, her rejoinder: “X is arbitrary but not indifferent.” By my reading, her point is not so much that we jettison difference, but, rather, reconsider the relation between the two terms, and the possibility for affectivity even after difference, such that a world created from arbitrary signifiers need not also be disaffected. Such that the subjects of this world — perhaps without fixed origin or matrix — still remain, nonetheless, fundamentally and insistently attached. ✺

Notes

antepartum 1. Antepartum was first shown in 1973 at Brighton Polytechnic (now called Faculty of the Arts, University of Brighton). Kelly had begun work on the Women and Work project (1975) and showed Antepartum alongside a film loop of a woman on the assembly line at a metal box factory. Mary Kelly, e-mail message to author, May 5, 2012. 2. Lucy Lippard, foreword to Post-Partum Document, by Mary Kelly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), xii. 3. “Hence there results that, at the level of the other signifier, the subject fades away.” Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1977), 236. 4. Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” in Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 140. 5. On video and the rhetorics of presence, see Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (Spring 1976): 50 – 64; and Anne M. Wagner, “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence,” October 91 (Winter 2000): 59 – 80. 6. Alexander Alberro gives voice to this widely held perception in “Mel Bochner: Thought Made Visible, 1966 – 1973,” Artforum 34 (February 1996): 80 – 81. It was as early as 1974 when Lucy Lippard famously made this observation “with some disillusion in the ‘Postface’ of Six Years: ‘Hopes that “conceptual art” would be able to avoid the general commercialization, the destructively “progressive” approach of modernism were for the most part unfounded.’” Lucy R. Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” in Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965 – 1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 37 – 38.

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7. Some of the most important discussions of conceptual art include Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Hans Haacke’s Paperwork,” Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 173 – 213; Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962 – 1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 105 – 43, originally published in Claude Gintz et al., L’art conceptual: Une perspective, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1989); Michael Corris, ed., Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Stephen Melville, “Aspects,” in Reconsidering the Object of Art, 229 – 45; Michael Newman and Jon Bird, eds., Rewriting Conceptual Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1999); Blake Stimson and

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

Alexander Alberro, eds., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); and more classically, Gregory Battcock, ed., Idea Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1973); Lippard, Six Years; Ursula Meyer, ed., Conceptual Art (New York: Dutton, 1972). See Lippard’s Six Years; and Stimson and Alberro, Conceptual Art. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962 – 1969,” 116. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, 203. For a useful anthology of some of the more significant primary texts and illustrations of artistic projects related to institutional critique, see Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); see also John C. Welchman, ed., Institutional Critique and After (SoCCAS symposia, vol. 2) (Zurich: JRP | R ingier, 2006). Michael Corris, “Part III: Recoding Information, Knowledge, and Technology,” in Conceptual Art, 187. Corris, “Introduction,” in Conceptual Art, 12. In his contribution, Richard J. Williams broaches the topic of art and the antihumanist turn. He focuses his sights on questions about authorship in the work of Robert Morris, rather than exploring those questions as embedded in and ramifying throughout the discourse of antihumanism. Richard J. Williams, “ ‘The Rotting Sack of Humanism’: Robert Morris and Authorship,” in Conceptual Art, ed. Corris, 169 – 86. Some of the more significant historical accounts of structuralism include Peter Caws, Structuralism: The Art of the Intelligible (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988); Roland A. Champagne, French Structuralism (St. Louis: University of Missouri Press, 1990); Françoise Dosse, History of Structuralism: The Rising Sign, 1945 – 1966, trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Françoise Dosse, History of Structuralism: The Sign Sets, 1967 – Present, trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Thomas Pavel, The Feud of Language: A History of Structuralist Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Philip Pettit, The Concept of Structuralism: A Critical Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); John Sturrock, Structuralism, 2nd ed. (1986; Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). As the International Association of Word and Image Studies will soon enter its fourth decade in existence, it is worth noting that the field of word and image studies has produced some exceptional scholarship. Nelson Goodman, W. J. T. Mitchell, Mieke Bal, Norman Bryson, and James Elkins identify the dominant modes of this domain of inquiry, its philosophical starting points, and recurrent sites of disagreement. Take, for example, Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), 136, 153 – 54, 160, 162, where he proposes the classification of symbol systems as either “differentiated” (having a finite number of mean-

no t e s t o 10 – 15 ingful marks, such as the alphabet and digital systems more generally) or “dense” (having infinite number of meaningful marks, with each as potentially significant). Or consider W. J. T. Mitchell’s landmark text, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), and its companion volume, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), where iconology is applied toward the claim that the “ekphrastic image [is] . . . a sort of unapproachable and unpresentable ‘black hole’ in the verbal structure, entirely absent from it, but shaping and affecting it in fundamental ways.” Mitchell, Picture Theory, 158. One might also look back to the exchanges between James Elkins and Mieke Bal in which they contest the appropriateness of semiotic systems to reading drawn marks. James Elkins, “Marks, Traces, Traits, Contours, Orli, and Splendores: Nonsemiotic Elements in Pictures,” Critical Inquiry 21 (Summer 1995): 822 – 60; Mieke Bal,

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

“Semiotic Elements in Academic Practices,” Critical Inquiry 22 (Spring 1996): 573 – 89; James Elkins, “What Do We Want Pictures to Be? Reply to Mieke Bal,” Critical Inquiry 22 (Spring 1996): 590 – 602. Then there are Elkin’s book-length explorations: Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?: On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity (New York: Routledge, 1999). Elkins elaborates his polemic against reading pictures as sign systems and takes a meta-theoretical look at art history’s practice of putting words to images. Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (New York: Norton, 1973), 314 – 19. Kaja Silverman, “Splits: Changing the Fantasmatic Scene,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 20 (1983): 27. Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 22. Kate Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism (Chicago: Open Court, 1986), 16 – 17. Roland Barthes, Critical Essays (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 218. Elizabeth W. Bruss, Beautiful Theories: The Spectacle of Discourse in Contemporary Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 3. In World Spectators, Kaja Silverman stages a brilliant polemic against this historical tendency to doubt away both the seeing subject and the visible world. Kaja Silverman, World Spectators (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Étienne Balibar, “Structuralism: A Destitution of the Subject?,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2003): 11. Lawrence Alloway, “Network: The Art World Described as a System,” Artforum 11, no. 1 (September 1972): 28 – 29. Alloway’s words on the art “system” suggest that the networked, globalized art world of the present day was already emerging in the 1960s, albeit under terms that may feel quite distant to us now. While I do not elaborate this connection here, my account could also be understood as a pre-history of the present. For an excellent consideration of the networked art world today, see Lane Relyea, “Your Art World: Or, The Limits of Connectivity,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 14 (Autumn / Winter 2006): 3 – 8.

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26. Anthony Wilden, System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange (London: Tavistock Publications, 1972), xxxviii. 27. Pamela Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 62 – 81. 28. Ibid., 65. 29. Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Introduction 2003: Are You History?” in Sturrock, Structuralism, 12. 30. Ibid., 11. 31. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, ed. Rodney Needham, trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). 32. Dosse, History of Structuralism: The Rising Sign, 1945 – 1966, 317. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47.

Ibid., xxiv. Wilden, System and Structure, xxxviii. Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954 – 1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991), 29. Jean Piaget, Structuralism, trans. and ed. Chaninah Maschler (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 7 (emphasis mine). Dosse, History of Structuralism: The Rising Sign, 1945 – 1966, 45. Viggo Bröndal, “Linguistique structurale,” Acta linguistica 1 – 2 (1939 – 41): 2 – 10; quoted in Dosse, History of Structuralism, xxii. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 247 – 72. Ibid., 249 (emphasis mine). Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 118. In Flesh of My Flesh, Kaja Silverman considers the gesture of “turning away” as it functions first and foremost within the narrative of Orpheus and Eurydice. She suggests that, although we have largely overlooked this fact, the story is emblematic for centuries of Western culture. While my focus here is not so much on “turning away” as it is on “turning around”— to face and be recognized by and in the symbolic order always ahead of us — Silverman’s rendering of “turning away” surely inhabits the underside of this maneuver and is, in fact, central to some of the work I discuss in later chapters. As I elaborate in chapter 2, Robert Morris uses the phrase “to turn away” to describe his own artistic practice. My analysis of the gesture of turning is, moreover, underpinned by Silverman’s polemic and, as such, I owe a debt of gratitude to her. Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Robert Morris, “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated,” in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 87. Robert Morris, “Introduction,” in Continuous Project Altered Daily, ix. Morris, “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making,” 87. Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” 22.

no t e s t o 22– 32 48. Fredric Jameson, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 15 – 16. 49. Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 3. 50. Ibid., 3. 51. Anne M. Wagner, “Splitting and Doubling: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Body of Sculpture,” Grey Room, no. 14 (Fall 2004): 31. 52. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962 – 1969.” 53. See especially Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect Sensation (Durham,

54.

55.

56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Terada, Feeling in Theory. For an astute discussion of these terms and their distinctions see Terada, “Introduction: Emotion after the ‘Death of the Subject,’” in Feeling in Theory, 1 – 15. For a discussion of affect in Freud’s early work, see André Green, The Fabric of Affect in Psychoanalytic Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1999), 13 – 72. Sigmund Freud, “The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 3:43 – 61; Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition, vols. 4, 5. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 3. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 27. Although I privilege Massumi’s particular formulation throughout this book, other notable theorists have likewise noted the ways in which matters of affect escape structuralist theoretical models. See especially Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins,” in Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 1 – 28. Ibid., 4. Rosalind Krauss, “Robert Morris: Around the Mind / Body Problem,” Art Press, no. 193 (July / August 1994): 26. Terada, Feeling in Theory, 15. Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” 65. “Naturally for the convenience and clarity of my little theoretical theatre I have had to present things in the form of a sequence, with a before and an after, and thus in the form of a temporal succession.” Althusser, “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses,” 118.

chapter one This chapter appeared in a shortened form as an article of the same title, “The Dream of the Information World,” Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 1 (March 2006): 115 – 35, by permission of Oxford University Press.

1. Kate M. Sellers, foreword to Sol LeWitt: Incomplete Open Cubes, ed. Nicholas Baume (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 7. 2. Jean Piaget, Structuralism, trans. and ed. Chaninah Maschler (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 5. 3. Ibid., 7 (emphasis mine).

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210

4. Lawrence Alloway, Systemic Painting (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1966); quoted in John Elderfield, “Grids,” Artforum 10, no. 9 (May 1972): 53. 5. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967): 79. For instance, see Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger, 1976); and Blake Stimson and Alexander Alberro, eds., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 6. Douglas Huebler, interview with Patricia Norvell, July 25, 1969, in Recording Conceptual Art, ed. Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 142, 147. 7. Statements of this sort went hand in hand with the transformation of conventional viewing

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

practices and venues — the “suppression of the beholder,” as Charles Harrison has called it. As he describes it, the point was to resist the idea that art viewership relies on spectation and, by extension, to contest the conventional ideology of visibility: formalism, objecthood, the art market, and related notions of style, quality, permanence, and authorship. Charles Harrison, “Conceptual Art and the Suppression of the Beholder,” in Essays on Art and Language (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 45. LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 79. Donald B. Kuspit, “Sol LeWitt: The Look of Thought,” in Sol LeWitt: Critical Texts, ed. Adachiara Zevi (Rome: I Libri di AEIOU, 1994), 210. Robert Smithson, “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 80. Kuspit, “Sol LeWitt,” 209 – 25. LeWitt, interview with Norvell, in Recording Conceptual Art, 121. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. David Weissman, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 96. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 96. For example, see Blake Stimson, “The Promise of Conceptual Art,” in Conceptual Art, ed. Alberro and Stimson. The Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects exhibition was held from April 10 to August 25, 1970. The exhibition was organized by Donald Karshan. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 129. Gregory Battcock, “Informative Exhibition,” Arts Magazine, Summer 1970; Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY: Information Exhibition Records, 8. Kynaston McShine, Information, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 1. Press release, March 1970; MoMA Archives, NY: Information Exhibition Records, 4.106a. McShine, Information, 138. Joseph Kosuth, “1975,” in Conceptual Art, eds. Alberro and Stimson, 338 – 39. The Information show was not the first to bring together art and technology. Among others, K. G. Pontus Hultén organized The Machine: As Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1968. It included work ranging from Leonardo da Vinci’s sixteenth-century drawings of flying machines to contemporary artist-engineer col-

no t e s t o 44– 54 laborations. Also in 1970, Jack Burnham curated the exhibition Software, Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art at the Jewish Museum. This show was the first major exhibition in the United States to utilize a computer in a museum context. Information was less overtly technological, focused on ends rather than means, and, moreover, mobilized “information” as a rhetorical figure. Because of this, the Information show gets us closest to the fantasies, aspirations, and anxieties that surrounded the term at this time. 24. Oskar Morgenstern, “The Great Number,” Austriannale, exh. cat. (Milano: Palazzo dell’Arte al Parco, 1968); MoMA Archives, NY: Information Exhibition Records, 2.56. 25. Marshall McLuhan, “Agnew Agonistes,” The McLuhan DEW-LINE 2, no. 4 (January – Feb-

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

ruary 1970): 2; MoMA Archives, NY: Information Exhibition Records, 1.11. This quote is popularly attributed to McLuhan and widely misattributed to Understanding Media, where it does not in fact appear. The source remains unknown. Michael Lauretano, the catalogue’s designer, admits, “We wanted to have a sameness about them all.” Michael Lauretano, interview with author, September 12, 2002. Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962 – 1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 105 – 43. Grace Glueck, “Art Community Here Agrees on Plan to Fight War, Racism and Oppression,” New York Times, May 19, 1970, 30. The Art Strike Against War, Repression, and Racism leaflets, Lucy Lippard Papers, Art Strike file, box 8, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. For a fuller account of this protest and related events, see Maurice Berger, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 107 – 27; and Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Robert Morris’s Art Strike,” Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 83 – 125. Tim Griffin, “Historical Survey: An Interview with Hans Haacke,” Artforum 43, no. 1 (September 2004): 224. Hans Haacke, “Information 2,” in Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects, exh. cat. (New York: New York Cultural Center, 1970), 32. In Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), Pamela M. Lee reads the MoMA Poll along with Haacke’s “real-time systems” through their incontestable situatedness in systems discourse, specifically, general system theory, and, by extension, what Lee calls “the question of time.” While Lee argues that the “rhetoric [of systems theory] informs and certainly facilitates a new understanding of many of the artistic practices of the 1960s” (67), I suggest that systems theory constitutes but one piece of the social fantasmatic critical to the understanding of the art of this period, one that, I explain below, must also take into account structuralist discourse and the extraordinary range of sign systems of which it speaks. John Giorno, under the guise of “Giorno Poetry Systems,” took a similar tack with his contribution to the show. His Dial-A-Poem public service cost the museum $284 a month to disseminate “revolutionary” information by phone. By dialing (212) 956-7032, the public could hear one of more than six hundred predominantly revolutionary tape-recorded messages: Kathleen Cleaver giving her version of how Black Panther Bobby Hutton was killed in a shootout with police; Weather Underground member Bernadine Dohrn on bombing a symbol of American imperialism; Abbie Hoffman telling college students to get their guns;

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212

Allen Ginsberg chanting mantras; revolutionary poet Diane di Prima advising young revolutionaries to “meditate, pray, make love, be prepared at any time to die.” The service received seventy-eight thousand calls in two months. “At this point, with the war and the repression and everything, we thought this was a good way for the Movement to reach people,” said Giorno. Lindsy Van Gelder, “Oppressed? Dial 956-7032,” New York Post, September 2, 1970; MoMA Archives, NY: Information Exhibition Records, 8. 34. This notion was espoused by many theoretical voices of the time. Yet the phrase itself — “the effect of the signifier”— comes from Jacques Lacan, who writes: “Indeed, the signifier is first of all that which has a meaning effect (effet de signifié ). . . .” Bruce Fink also translates

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

the French as “an effect as signified” or “the signified qua effect.” Lacan, Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972 – 1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 18, 18n9. Roland Barthes, “Change the Object Itself,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), 167. Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 146. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 112 – 13. Étienne Balibar, “Structuralism: A Destitution of the Subject?,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2003): 3 – 4. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGrawHill, 1966). Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967), 10. Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 1:514 – 15. Pamela Lee, “Drawing Is Another Kind of Language”: Recent American Drawings from a New York Private Collection, exh. cat. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 1997). Indeed, dozens of exhibitions focusing on the appearance of language in the visual field have been assembled since the period in question under any number of names comprised of some conjoining of the terms “word” and “image,” “language” and “picture,” or “verbal” and “visual.” A partial list of these exhibitions and their dates includes: Word and Image, 1965; Word and Image, 1968; Word and Image, 1974; Visual / Verbal, 1974; Words and Images, 1978; Ikon Logos: Word as Image, 1981; Written Imagery Unleashed in the 20th Century, 1983; Image / Word: The Art of Reading, 1985; Image and Word, 1987; Word as Image, 1989; Words and Images in Modernism and Postmodernism, 1989; Word as Image: American Art, 1960 – 1990, 1990; Word and Image: Interactions, 1990; Word and Image, 1994; Image, Word, and Self, 1997; The Pictured Word, 1998; and in a particularly equivocating attempt: The Next Word: Text and / as Image and / as Design and / as Meaning, 1998. Such pairings and chiastic figurations as these have been for the art curator a refuge for saying generally quite superficial things about a phenomenon that too often gets reduced to the “word-image” problem in later twentieth-century art. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962 – 1969,” 107. In an essay titled “Modernism, Postmodernism, and Steam,” T. J. Clark argues that modernism “wished to understand, and put under real pressure, the deep structure of belief of its own historical moment — those things about itself that modernity most took for granted, or

no t e s t o 59– 60 most wished were true.” “Modernism,” Clark continues, “was interested in the images and occasions of modern life, at least part of the time, but also, more deeply, in modernity’s means of representation — the deep structure of symbolic production and reproduction within it.” While I am concerned with the aesthetico-political claims and epistemic climate of the late 1960s and early ’70s, Clark’s polemic is instructive for my own. His is not just a call to the art of the present moment to question the deep structures of belief of its day; it is also an argument about the kind of questioning that is truly revelatory. Clark calls this questioning “the test of form” and suggests in arguing that “the art that survives is the art that lays hold of the primary process, not the surface image-flow” that the aesthetic field is responsible for

45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

bringing into appearance, for formulating, the social fantasies that govern its time. Clark, “Modernism, Postmodernism, and Steam,” October, no. 100 (Spring 2002), 172, 164, 173. Piaget, Structuralism, 7, 9. Clark, “Modernism, Postmodernism, and Steam,” 164. Roland Barthes, “Réponses: Interview with Tel Quel,” in The Tel Quel Reader, ed. Patrick ffrench and Roland-François Lack (New York: Routledge, 1998), 257. “It is the world of words that creates the world of things.” “Man speaks, then, but it is because the symbol has made him man.” Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 65. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959 – 1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 213. “Dans l’écriture multiple, en effet, tout est à démêler, mais rien n’est à déchiffrer: la structure peut étre suivie, ‘filée’ (comme on dit d’une maille de bas qui part). . . .” Roland Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur,” in Roland Barthes: Oeuvres completes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1994), 2:949; Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, 146 – 47. Significantly, as Benjamin Buchloh has already noted, the first English translation of Barthes’s text appeared in a 1967 issue of Aspen Magazine alongside an essay in which LeWitt describes the “serial artist,” who aims not “to produce a beautiful or mysterious object,” but “to give viewers information” as would a “clerk cataloguing the results of his premise.” Sol LeWitt, “Serial Project #1, 1966,” Aspen Magazine, nos. 5 – 6, ed. Brian O’Doherty, 1967; quoted in Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962 – 1969,” 140. Piaget, Structuralism, 138 – 39. Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 113. For a fascinating reading of the grid as form, material, and figure, see Hannah Higgins, The Grid Book (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). Lucy Lippard, “Top to Bottom, Left to Right,” Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1972). Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 120. McLuhan, “The Dewline Newsletter: Megascene Section,” Human Development 1, no. 8 (February 1969): 6. The epigraph to Jameson’s The Prison-House of Language reads: “We have to cease to think if we refuse to do it in the prison-house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit. . . .” According to David Lovekin,

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no t e s t o 61– 69 Jameson’s attribution of the phrase in fact relies upon Erich Heller’s rather loose translation of Nietzsche’s actual words in Der Wille zur Macht. David Lovekin, Technique, Discourse, and Consciousness: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jacques Ellul (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1991), 209. 58. “So it is that our possession by language,” writes Jameson, “which ‘writes’ us even as we imagine ourselves to be writing it, is not so much some ultimate release from bourgeois subjectivism, but rather a limiting situation against which we must struggle at every instant.” Jameson, The Prison-House of Language, 140. 59. Jacques Lacan, quoted in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 210 – 11. 60. Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” 48. 61. Jonathan Flatley, “Art Machine,” in Sol LeWitt: Incomplete Open Cubes, ed. Nicholas Baume (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 101. 62. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 146 – 47. 63. Max Kozloff, “The Trouble with Art-as-Idea,” Artforum 11, no. 1 (September 1972): 35. 64. Hilton Kramer, “Miracles, ‘Information,’ ‘Recommended Reading,’” New York Times, July 12, 1970, D19. 65. Don McDonagh, “Information,” from an unidentified London newspaper; MoMA Archives, NY: Information Exhibition Records, 8. 66. Carter Ratcliff, “New York Letter,” Studio International 14, no. 7 (September 1970): 95. 67. As epigraph to The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Lévi-Strauss includes a passage taken from E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture. Few who will give their minds to master the general principles of savage religion will ever again think it ridiculous, or the knowledge of it superfluous to the rest of mankind. Far from its beliefs and practices being a rubbish-heap of miscellaneous folly, they are consistent and logical in so high a degree as to begin, as soon as even roughly classified, to display the principles of their formation and development; and these principles prove to be essentially rational, though working in a mental condition of intense and inveterate ignorance. . . . The tendency of modern inquiry is more and more towards the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is everywhere.

Pitting miscellany against logic, rubbish against reason, and savagery against the masterful minds of modern inquiry, the passage insists upon the idea that law is so prevalent, we may as well think it natural, and — because of this fact — reason can be found even amidst “ignorance.” E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture; quoted in Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, ed. Rodney Needham, trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), xxi. 68. Rosalind Krauss, “Robert Morris: Around the Mind / Body Problem,” Art Press, no. 193 (July / August 1994): 32 (emphasis added). 69. Robert Smithson, “The Establishment,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Flam, 97 – 99. This essay was also published in an Italian publication titled “La sfida del sistema,” or “The Challenge of the System,” which Kynaston McShine got hold of somehow and kept in his files for the Information show. “La sfida del sistema,” Metro 14 (June 1968): 52; MoMA Archives, NY: Information Exhibition Records, 2.57. 70. François Dosse, History of Structuralism: The Rising Sign, 1945 – 1966, trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xxvi.

no t e s t o 73– 79

chapter two A portion of this chapter was previously published as “How to Keep Mark Making Alive: Robert Morris in Blind Time,” in Pro Forma: Language /  Text /  Visual Art, vol. 1, ed. Jessica Wyman (Toronto: YYZBooks, 2005 ), 70–87. Reprinted here by permission of YYZBooks.

1. Erwin Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York: Doubleday, 1955; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 26 – 54. 2. My reading of 21.3 is indebted to that of Richard J. Williams. See Richard J. Williams, “ ‘ The

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

Rotting Sack of Humanism’: Robert Morris and Authorship,” in Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice, ed. Michael Corris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 170 – 74. Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962 – 1964 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 188. Maurice Berger, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 25. The second series of Blind Time drawings was produced in 1976; Blind Time III in 1985; the fourth series, Blind Time (Drawing with Davidson), in 1991; the fifth, Blind Time: Melancholia, in 1999; the sixth, Moral Blinds, in 2000; and the most recent series, Blind Time (Grief), in 2009. Williams, “ ‘The Rotting Sack of Humanism,’” 170. Robert Morris: The Mind / Body Problem, exh. cat. (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1994), 160. Robert Morris, “Introduction,” in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), ix. Erwin Panofsky, “Introduction: The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts; originally published in The Meaning of the Humanities, ed. T. M. Greene (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940), 89 – 118. J. A. Emmens and Gary Schwartz, “Erwin Panofsky as a Humanist,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 2, no. 3 (1967 – 68): 109 – 13. Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” 2. Jean Baudrillard, “The Ideological Genesis of Needs,” in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (New York: Telos Press, 1981). Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 85 – 126. Judith Butler’s reading of Althusser has greatly aided my own. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1997). For a broad overview of Morris’s work in relation to these figures and others as intellectual sources for his work, see Maurice Berger, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row, 1989). Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion After the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 57. Robert Morris, “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated,” in Continuous Project Altered Daily (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 87.

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no t e s t o 80– 89 18. Donald Judd, “Complaints: Part I,” in Complete Writings, 1959 – 1975 (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975), 198. 19. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Wall Labels: Word, Image, and Object in the Work of Robert Morris,” in Robert Morris: The Mind / Body Problem, exh. cat. (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1994), 66. 20. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 249 (emphasis mine). 21. “La sfida del sistema,” Metro 14 (June 1968): 52; MoMA Archives, NY: Information Exhibition Records, 2.57. 22. Robert Smithson, “The Establishment,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 97 – 99. 23. Rosalind Krauss, “Robert Morris: Around the Mind / Body Problem,” Art Press, no. 193 (July / August 1994): 24 – 32; quoted in Williams, “ ‘ The Rotting Sack of Humanism,’ ” 174. 24. Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962 – 1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 105 – 43. 25. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 3 – 4 . 26. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2005), 3. 27. Sianne Ngai discusses this sort of aesthetic effect in light of the concept of “tone”; before her others, including Adorno, have grappled with versions of the notion in terms of “mood,” or “that in which the effect and the internal constitution of works formed a murky amalgam that went beyond their individual elements,” producing what Adorno calls a “twilight.” Ibid., 46; Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 275. 28. Matthew Jesse Jackson, “Para-Performative Practices and Late Modernism: On Contemporary Art and the Museum,” Museum International 59, no. 3 (September 2007): 42. 29. It is striking but not at all surprising to read Jill Johnston’s February 27 Village Voice review of Morris’s performance of 21.3. She hinges her review of Morris’s performance on a description that becomes consumed by her own self-pleasure. “Morris illustrates the product in the process of a lecture, which in turn becomes a product illustrating the process of the paper. It all turns around on itself. I’m turning some verbal cartwheels myself here, and I wouldn’t mind if the whole thing began to sound absurd. This is definitely an absurd commentary.” Finally, she notes her amusement and satisfaction, as if seeing the whole experience from afar: “I’m having a good time. No doubt the point is to have a good time.” Jill Johnston, “Pain, Pleasure, Process,” Village Voice, February 27, 1964, 9, 15. 30. Étienne Balibar, “Structuralism: A Destitution of the Subject?,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2003): 5. Foucault developed his notion of “the thought from the outside” in the 1966 essay “La pensée du dehors,” in which he considers Maurice Blanchot. Locating the “experience of the outside” in a variety of practices unmistakably structuralist in nature — “in the simple gesture of writing as in attempts to formalize language; in the study of myths as in psychoanalysis; in the search for a Logos that would be like the birthplace of

no t e s t o 89– 94 all of Western reason”— Foucault concludes that we are “standing on the edge of an abyss that had long been invisible: the being of language only appears for itself with the disappearance of the subject.” In order to grasp this “strange relation” between language and subjectivity, Foucault points to what he calls “a form of thought”— “the thought from the outside.” Michel Foucault, “The Experience of the Outside,” in Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and Brian Massumi (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 15 – 16. 31. Roland Barthes, “Réponses: Interview with Tel Quel,” in The Tel Quel Reader, ed. Patrick ffrench and Roland-François Lack (New York: Routledge, 1998), 257. 32. In a notice sent to the Whitney Museum demanding the closing of his solo show, Morris

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

wrote, “A reassessment of the art structure itself seems timely — its values, its policies, its modes of control, its economic presumptions, its hierarchy of existing power and administration.” Whitney Museum, unpublished press release, May 15, 1970, Protest file, Whitney Museum Archives. See especially Maurice Berger, Labyrinths, 107 – 27; and Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 83 – 125. Cindy Nemser, “Artists and the System: Far from Cambodia,” Village Voice, May 28, 1970, 20 – 21. Ibid., 20; Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (New York: Beacon Press, 1969), 25; quoted in Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 118. In 1964 Marcuse defined “the Great Refusal” as “the protest against that which is”— a protest historically represented by art itself. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (New York: Beacon Press, 1964), 64. Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), 83. Ibid., 83. Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey, Albert A. Anderson, Willis Domingo, and Leon Jacobson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 177; quoted in Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 47 – 48. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). Robert Morris, “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated,” in Continuous Project Altered Daily (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 77. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 204. Ibid., 301. Ibid., 204. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966), 68. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, Critical Edition by Rudolf Engler (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1967 – 74), 153. For a brilliant and sustained reading of the far-reaching implications of the notion of the general equivalent, see Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Mary and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).

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no t e s t o 95– 105 47. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 120. 48. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), §50. 49. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, ed. Lesley Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), s.v. “arbiter.” 50. Ibid., s.v. “motivate.” 51. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 68. 52. Kate Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism (Chicago: Open Court Paperbacks, 1986), 16 – 17. 53. François Dosse, History of Structuralism: The Rising Sign, 1945 – 1966, trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xxv. 54. Morris, “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making,” 87. 55. Freud emphasizes that affect “possesses all the characteristics of a quantity (though we have no means of measuring it).” He further suggests that that quantity is “capable of increase, diminution, displacement and discharge”; it is “spread over the memory-traces of ideas somewhat as an electric charge is spread over the surface of a body.” Moreover, affect is a measure that moves. Sigmund Freud, “The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 3:60. For a review of this period of Freud’s affect theory, see André Green, The Fabric of Affect in Psychoanalytic Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1999), 13 – 72. The notion of affect as related to movement dates back at least to René Descartes. See René Descartes, “The Passions of The Soul,” in What Is an Emotion?, ed. Robert C. Solomon, trans. G. R. T Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 20 – 30. 56. Victor Li, The Neo-Primitivist Turn: Critical Reflections on Alterity, Culture, and Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), ix. 57. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 118–19. 58. Each series is governed by a different thematic. The drawings from 1999 and 2000 were produced with black ink on transparent vellum, as opposed to the graphite powder on paper of the earlier series. Several circumstances make the determination of the precise number of drawings impossible. Morris himself does not recall precisely how many drawings he made, and he discards some after each series is complete. Thomas Krens records in a 1982 catalogue essay that there are ninety-eight drawings from the 1973 series, all dating from the latter half of that year. Thomas Krens, The Drawings of Robert Morris (Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art, 1982). More recently, Jean-Pierre Criqui writes that there are “probably about some three hundred and fifty numbered pieces, although we are on uncertain ground here because of the lack of any continuous record of the production and whereabouts of the sheets.” Jean-Pierre Criqui, “Drawing from the Heart of Darkness: Robert Morris’s Blind Time,” in Robert Morris: Blind Time Drawings, 1973 – 2000, ed. Jean-Pierre Criqui (Prato: Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, 2005), 11. 59. See Jacques Revel, “The Uses of Civility,” in A History of Private Life: Possessions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 167 – 205. 60. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1977), 236.

no t e s t o 105– 121 61. Serge Tisseron, “All Writing Is Drawing: The Spatial Development of the Manuscript,” Yale French Studies, no. 84 (1994): 33. 62. My discussion of writing and drawing owes much to Martine Reid’s consideration of those terms as well as several other essays contained in the issue of Yale French Studies that Reid edited. See especially, “Editor’s Preface: Legible / Visible,” Yale French Studies, no. 84 (1994): 1. 63. Plato, Phaedrus, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 275a – b. 64. Morris, “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making,” 87. 65. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 93, 103. 66. For a stunning elaboration of “the world” as a figure for which affectivity counts immeasurably, see Kaja Silverman, World Spectators (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 67. Robert Morris in Jonathan Fineberg, “Robert Morris Looking Back: An Interview,” Arts Magazine, September 1980, 114. 68. From a conversation with author, January 9, 2001.

chapter three An excerpt from this chapter will appear in Retracing the Expanded Field, ed. Spyros Papapetros and Julian Rose (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

1. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 28. 2. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 2. 3. Ibid., 278. 4. Ibid., 3. 5. Ibid., 1, 2. 6. David Carrier cites one of Krauss’s 1971 contributions to Artforum as anticipatory of her structuralist turn. Rosalind Krauss, “Problems of Criticism, X: Pictorial Space and the Question of Documentary,” Artforum, November 1971, 69; cited in David Carrier, Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: From Formalism to Beyond Postmodernism, (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 38. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), 142 – 47. 7. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30 – 44; republished in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 276 – 90. All future citations are from The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. 8. Other, prior moves to do the same — such as those contained in the 1966 “Structuralism” issue of Yale French Studies — had minimal if any impact. Sheldon Nodelman, “Structural Analysis in Art and Anthropology,” Yale French Studies, nos. 36 / 37 (1966): 89 – 103. 9. Benjamin Buchloh, discussant in “The Expanded Field on the Table,” Retracing the Expanded Field: A Conference on Art and Architecture, 20 – 21 April, 2007 (School of Architecture, Princeton University, New Jersey). 10. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 279, 290.

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11. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGrawHill, 1966). 12. A. J. Greimas, Sémantique structurale (Paris: Larousse, 1966); A. J. Greimas and Joseph Courtés, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary, trans. Larry Crist and Daniel Patte et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 25. 13. A. J. Greimas and François Rastier, “The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints,” Yale French Studies, no. 41 (1968): 88. 14. François Dosse, History of Structuralism: The Rising Sign, 1945 – 1966, trans. Deborah Glassman (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 210. 15. Rosalind Krauss, discussant in “The Expanded Field on the Table,” Retracing the Expanded

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

Field: A Conference on Art and Architecture, 20 – 21 April 2007 (School of Architecture, Princeton University, NJ). Fredric Jameson, “Romance and Reification: Plot Construction and Ideological Closure in Joseph Conrad,” in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 167, 254, 256, 276, 277. The relationship between affect and the semiotic square — both the latter’s affectivity and its repression of affect — makes an appropriate appearance in Jameson’s 1984 use of the square to forward his argument about the “waning of affect” in postmodern culture. Fredric Jameson, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 10. Krauss, discussant in “The Expanded Field on the Table.” Greimas and Rastier, “The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints,” 86. Ibid., 86. Dosse, History of Structuralism: The Rising Sign, 1945 – 1966, 214. My narration of the generation of the square owes much to Nancy Armstrong, “Inside Greimas’s Square: Literary Characters and Cultural Restraint,” in The Sign in Music and Literature, ed. Wendy Steiner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 54. Ronald Schleifer and Alan Velie, “Genre and Structure: Toward an Actantial Typology of Narrative Genres and Modes,” MLN 102, no. 5, Comparative Literature (December 1987): 1123. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 284, 277. Jameson, “Romance and Reification,” 254. I do not purport to examine the many iterations of the expanded field, and in fact many of the authors that have used the term do not necessarily refer directly to Krauss’s essay or the semiotic square. A list of these texts is only begun with the following, noted here in order of their appearance: Norman Bryson, “The Gaze in the Expanded Field,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 87 – 113; Adam Lucas, “Art, Science and Technology in an Expanded Field,” Leonardo 26, no. 4 (1993): 335 – 45; Wystan Curnow, “Mapping and the Expanded Field of Contemporary Art,” in Mappings, ed. Denis Cosgrove (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 253 – 68; Andreas Huyssen, “High / Low in an Expanded Field,” Modernism / Modernity 9, no. 3 (2002): 363 – 74; Mieke Bal, “Meanwhile: Literature in an Expanded Field,” Thamyris / Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race, no. 11 (2003): 183 – 97; Gustavo Fares, “Painting in the Expanded Field,” Janus Head 7, no. 2 (2004): 477 – 87; Anthony Vidler, “Architecture’s Expanded Field,” ArtForum 42, no. 8 (April 2004): 142 – 47; George Baker, “Photography’s Expanded Field,” October, no. 114 (Fall 2005): 120 – 40; Lytle Shaw, “Androids in the Expanded Field: Smithson on Judd” (paper presented for the Department of Art History, Northwestern

no t e s t o 126– 136

25. 26. 27. 28.

University, Evanston, Illinois, January 4, 2007); Huey Copeland, “Blackness in the Expanded Field” (paper presented for Here and Now: African and African-American Art and Film, New York University, November 2007); Linda Scharf, “Crochet in the Expanded Field,” SuperNaturale, undated article posted to website http://www.supernaturale.com / articles.html?id=166. Baker, “Photography’s Expanded Field,” 128. Ibid., 124. Spyros Papapetros, “Opening Remarks,” Retracing the Expanded Field: A Conference on Art and Architecture, 20 – 21 April, 2007 (School of Architecture, Princeton University, New Jersey). Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and

Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 118. 29. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 4. 30. Robert Smithson, “Fragments of an Interview with P. A. [Patsy] Norvell,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 194. 31. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 118. 32. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 282. 33. Ronald Schleifer, A. J. Greimas and the Nature of Meaning: Linguistics, Semiotics, and Discourse Theory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), x. 34. Anne M. Wagner, “Splitting and Doubling: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Body of Sculpture,” Grey Room, no. 14 (Fall 2004): 31. 35. Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 1:514 – 15. 36. “By contrast [to the nonstructuralist model of criticism], the structuralist model of substitutions and nomination does not call to mind the image of depth — substitution being able, after all, to take place by moving pieces about on a plane surface. Thus if Barthes cherishes the Argo-model, it is for its shallowness.” Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, 3. 37. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 18:7 – 64. 38. Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 65. 39. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 277, 280. 40. I thank Hal Foster for bringing this connection to my attention. Adolf Loos, “Architektur,” in Sämtliche Schriften (Vienna: Herold, 1962), 1:315; cf. Adolf Loos, “Architecture,” trans. Wilfried Wang, in The Architecture of Adolf Loos, Yehuda Safran and Wilfried Wang (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985), 108. 41. Ronald Onorato, Mary Miss: Perimeters / Pavilions / Decoys (New York: Nassau County Museum of Fine Arts, 1978), 11. 42. Thomas Pavel, The Feud of Language: A History of Structuralist Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 9. 43. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 280, 282. 44. Ibid., 279. 45. Ibid., 284. 46. Greimas and Rastier, “The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints,” 96. 47. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 279. 48. Wagner, “Splitting and Doubling,” 30 – 31.

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no t e s t o 136– 145 49. Gene Youngblood, preface to Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970), 41. 50. Elizabeth Patterson, “Visionary Machines: A Genealogy of the Digital Image” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2007), 118. 51. Ibid., 94 – 141. 52. Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 169. 53. Patterson, “Visionary Machines,” 119, 123. 54. Robert Smithson, “The Establishment,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Flam, 97. 55. Craig Owens, “Earthwords,” October 10 (Autumn 1979): 122, 130; Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 249 (emphasis mine). 56. Jennifer L. Roberts, Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 6, 141n7. 57. Alan Holden and Phylis Singer, Crystals and Crystal Growing (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 33. 58. Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Flam, 100. 59. Since the acquisition of Smithson’s papers and library by the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in 1987, scholars have had access to these holdings. The contents of his library have been published in various locations including the catalogue for the Robert Smithson retrospective, organized by Eugenie Tsai and Cornelia Butler in 2004. Robert Smithson, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), 249 – 63. Smithson’s personal library contains many volumes on crystallography. See Robert Smithson Library, Archives of American Art / Smithsonian Institution, boxes 9, 17, 20, 31, 49, 64, 66. 60. Roberts, Mirror-Travels, 40. 61. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1977), 203. 62. Source unknown, quoted in Smithson, “The Crystal Land,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Flam, 8. 63. Charles Bunn, Crystals: Their Role in Nature and Science (New York: Academic Press, 1964), 45; quoted in Roberts, Mirror-Travels, 41. 64. Roberts, Mirror-Travels, 40 – 41. 65. Holden and Singer, Crystals and Crystal Growing, 33. 66. Smithson, “Earth,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Flam, 187. 67. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 280. 68. Smithson, “Earth,” 187. 69. Lytle Shaw, “Smithson, Writer,” in Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty: True Fictions, False Realities, ed. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2005), 116. 70. Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Flam, 22 – 23. 71. Ibid., 22. 72. Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind,” 100. 73. Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” 23. 74. Shaw, “Smithson, Writer,” 116.

no t e s t o 145– 166 75. Smithson, “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Flam, 79 – 80. 76. “Perspectiva ist ein lateinisch wort, bedeutt ein Durchsehung.” (“Perspectiva is a Latin word which means ‘seeing through.’ ”) Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 27. 77. Robert Hobbs, Robert Smithson: Sculpture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 103. 78. Smithson’s “entropic” pole is centered, appropriately, not at the conventionally privileged northern- or southernmost point of the earth, but in a swamp, located not far from East Rutherford in Bergen County, New Jersey. Hobbs, Robert Smithson, 96. 79. Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind,” 100. 80. Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” 21. 81. This drawing could also be said to visually resemble Smithson’s written description of a drive he once made through the Lincoln Tunnel: “The countless cream colored square tiles on the walls of the tunnel sped by, until a sign announcing New York broke the tiles’ order.” Smithson, “The Crystal Land,” 9. 82. Smithson, “Fragments of an Interview with P. A. [Patsy] Norvell,” 194. 83. Smithson, “Some Void Thoughts on Museums,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Flam, 42. 84. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 28, 32. 85. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 4. 86. Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” 21. 87. Ibid.

c h a p t e r f our 1. Post-Partum Document’s exhibition history began in 1975, when Kelly showed “Documentation I” alone in a show titled “Sexuality and Socialization” at the Northern Arts Gallery in Newcastle. In addition to several other subsequent exhibitions, the work has been shown in its entirety at the Generali Foundation in Vienna in 1998, at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in the winter of 2010 – 11, and at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, in 2011. Mary Kelly, preface to Post-Partum Document (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), xix. 2. Étienne Balibar, “Structuralism: A Destitution of the Subject?,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2003): 17. 3. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 51. 4. In her 1982 foreword to the work, Lucy Lippard cites “ ‘visualization’ . . . without ‘picturing’” and “the resolute avoidance of photography” as one of the work’s “intentional contradictions.” Lucy Lippard, foreword to Post-Partum Document, xiv. 5. Mary Kelly in conversation with Juli Carson, “Excavating Post-Partum Document,” in Rereading Post-Partum Document, ed. Sabine Breitwieser (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 1998), 204. 6. Kelly, preface to Post-Partum Document, xix. 7. Lippard, foreword, Post-Partum Document, xii. 8. In his catalogue essay “Posing,” written for the 1985 exhibition Difference, Craig Owens reads the exchange of looks in this photograph as a literal explication of Lacan’s gaze diagram: “What

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is most fascinating about this image . . . is the child’s gaze, which seems to puncture the otherwise impenetrable surface of the image in order to fix us, its viewers, in place. What is this immobilizing gaze if not the figuration . . . of the gaze of the otherwise invisible photographer who framed and stilled this scene? For there are not just two, but three subjects represented here; the identity of the third party is acknowledged outside the frame, in a caption that gives credit for considerably more than the image, since the name of the photographer is also the name of the father: Ray Barrie.” Craig Owens, “Posing,” in Difference: On Representation and Sexuality, exh. cat. (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 10. 9. In the “Rome Discourse,” Lacan describes the word as “freed from the hic et nunc.” This

10.

11.

12. 13.

formulation follows Freud’s celebrated account of his grandson’s fort-da game. Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 65. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 18: 7 – 64. Kelly invokes just this notion at another point in the work. She writes: “During the antepartum period (gestation inside the mother’s body) and continuing during the breast-feeding phase of early postpartum, the mother’s negative place in the patriarchal order — more precisely the Symbolic — can be ‘misrecognized’ because in a sense the child is the phallus for her. Until birth the child is part of the mother’s body, and later comes to her as an object which was once a part of herself.” This text is reproduced in Mary Kelly, “Experimentum Mentis I: Weaning from the Breast,” in Post-Partum Document, 40. Sigmund Freud, “Femininity,” in The Standard Edition, 22: 128 – 29. In her preface to the work, Kelly elaborates this fundamental narrative in this way, incorporating the psychoanalytic notions of fetishism as well: “Sexual identity is said to be the outcome of a precarious passage called the Oedipus complex, a passage which is in a certain sense completed by the acceptance of symbolic castration. But castration is also inscribed at the level of the imaginary, that is in fantasy, and this is where the fetishistic scenario originates and is continually replayed. The child’s recognition of difference between the mother and the father is above all an admission that the mother does not have the phallus. In this case seeing is not necessarily believing since what is at stake for the child is really the question of his or her own relation to having or being. Hence the fetishist, conventionally assumed to be male, postpones that moment of recognition, although certainly he has made the passage — he knows the difference, but denies it. In terms of representation, this denial is associated with a definite iconography of pornographic images where the man is reassured by the woman’s possession of some form of phallic substitute or alternatively by the shape, the complete arrangement of her body. Yet the woman, in so far as the outcome of the oedipal moment has involved at some point a heterosexual object choice (that is, she has identified with her mother and has taken her father as a love object), will also postpone the recognition of lack in view of the promise of having the child. In having the child, in a sense she has the phallus. So the loss of the child is the loss of that symbolic plenitude. . . .” Mary Kelly, preface to Post-Partum Document, xix – x x. Ibid., xx. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition 4:261.

no t e s t o 169– 175 14. Jacques Lacan, “The Freudian Thing, or The Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits, 114. 15. Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), 173. 16. “In a hundred places in his work, Freud calls himself a theoretician; he compares psychoanalysis, as far as its scientificity is concerned, with the physical sciences that stem from Galileo, he repeats that the practice (cure) and analytical technique (analytical method) are only authentic because they are based on a scientific theory. Freud says time and again that a practice and a technique, even if they give results, do not deserve the name of science unless a theory gives them the right to it, not by mere declaration, but by rigorous proof. Lacan’s first word is to take these words literally. . . . [His] return to Freud means: a return to the theory established, fixed and founded firmly in Freud himself, to the mature, reflected, supported and verified theory, to the advanced theory that has settled down in life.” “In every authentically constituted science, the practice is not the absolute of the science but a theoretically subordinate moment.” Louis Althusser, “Freud and Lacan,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 135 – 36. Juli Carson notes that

17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Kelly got her “first references to Lacan” from this essay. Mary Kelly in conversation with Juli Carson, “Excavating Post-Partum Document,” 199. Evans, Introductory Dictionary, 7. Lacan’s articulation of his views on language dates back to the early 1930s, when he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the writings of a psychotic woman. But his “linguistic turn,” properly speaking, happened in the mid- to late 1950s, when he turned to the work of Claude LéviStrauss, who in the 1940s applied the methods of structuralist linguistics to the analysis of cultural data in his “structural anthropology.” Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in Freudian Unconscious,” in Écrits, 313. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954 – 55, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991), 243. For a clear and compelling elaboration of the notion of “symbolic castration,” see Kaja Silverman, “Lost Objects and Mistaken Subjects: A Prologue,” in The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 1–41. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, 243. For instance, see Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” trans. David Allison, in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 129 – 60. Jacques Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” in Écrits, 253. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955 – 56, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), 274. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, 244. Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 194. Lacan, “The Field and Function of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits, 44, 99.

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no t e s t o 177– 197 29. Roland Barthes, “Réponses: Interview with Tel Quel,” in The Tel Quel Reader, ed. Patrick ffrench and Roland-François Lack (New York: Routledge, 1998), 257. 30. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, 118. 31. Ibid., 119. 32. Paul Smith, “Mother as Site of Her Proceedings: Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document,” Parachute, no. 26 (1982), in Kelly, “Appendix,” in Post-Partum Document, 213. 33. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, 29. 34. Gilles Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?,” trans. Melissa McMahon and Charles J. Stivale, in Charles Stivale, The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari (New York: Guilford Press, 1998), 263. 35. Balibar, “Structuralism,” 5. 36. Gabrielle Guercio, “Formed in Résistance: Barry, Huebler, Kosuth and Weiner vs. the American Press,” in Claude Gintz, L’art conceptual: Une perspective, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1989), 75 – 76. 37. See especially Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962 – 1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 105 – 43; Lucy Lippard, “Postface,” in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 263 – 64; Robert Smithson, “Production for Production’s Sake,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 378; Blake Stimson, “The Promise of Conceptual Art,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), xxxviii – lii. 38. Mary Kelly in conversation with Juli Carson, “Excavating Post-Partum Document,” 189 – 95. 39. See especially Kaja Silverman, “Lost Objects and Mistaken Subjects: A Prologue,” 1 – 41. 40. Brian Massumi, “Introduction,” in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 3. 41. Ibid., 5, 4. 42. See Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, wherein Judith Butler writes of the efforts within recent feminist theory to “retrieve the body from what is often characterized as the linguistic idealism of poststructuralism.” In asking if “anything matter[s] in or for poststructuralism?” Butler calls for a reconsideration of the relationship between signification and materiality. She writes, “To know the significance of something is to know how and why it matters, where ‘to matter’ means at once ‘to materialize’ and ‘to mean.’ ” Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 27 – 28, 32. 43. Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 167. 44. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 43. 45. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 118. 46. Herbert Brant and Margaret Brant, Dictionary of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Contraception (London: Mayflower Books, 1971). 47. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 2; Butler, Bodies That Matter, 28. 48. Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 114. 49. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form (New York: Dover Edition, 1992), 1033. 50. Ibid., 1032.

no t e s t o 198– 204 51. Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 113 – 14 (emphasis mine). 52. Stephen Melville, “Aspects,” in Reconsidering the Object of Art, 1965 – 1975, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1995), 231 – 32. 53. Jack Burnham, “Alice’s Head,” Artforum 8, no. 6 (February 1970): 37 – 43. 54. Raimundas Malasauskas, “You Never Know Where It Goes: Interview with Robert Barry,” Newspaper 36 (March – April 2003): 11. 55. Robert Smithson, “The Establishment,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Flam, 97 – 99. 56. Lippard, foreword, Post-Partum Document, xii. 57. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III, 31. 58. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 67 – 69. 59. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in The Originality of the AvantGarde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 282. 60. Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: The New Press, 1983), 58. 61. Ibid., 57, 58, 59, 77. 62. Ibid., 77 (emphasis mine).

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by an “f” refer to figures. “Absentee Information And Or Criticism” (Lippard), 62 Acconci, Vito, 5, 39, 41 affect: affect management in Kelly’s work, 175, 195; affect of indifference in Kelly’s work, 204; the body and, 21–22, 24, 79–80, 87, 116, 195; conceptualized as a moving quantity, 99, 218n55; conditions of belatedness and, 23, 24; deploying of the term by the author, 23–25, 209n62; information and interpretations of, 22–23, 209n62; Krauss’s “expanded field” paradigm’s position in art historical discourse, 120–21, 123, 125; Massumi’s notion of affect as occurring in the gaps of the grid, 24, 87, 186, 196; Morris’s concept of “the motivated” and, 20, 79, 107–11; practice of immanent externality and, 89, 216n30; resilience of, 87; role in Morris’s systems, 79, 88–89, 91–92; Smithson’s work

and, 152; structuralist principle of difference and, 203–4 Air Time (Acconci), 5 Alberro, Alexander, 205n6 Alexander, Sally, 183 Alloway, Lawrence, 14–15, 32, 207n25 Althusser, Louis, 9, 10, 19, 78–80, 92, 99, 100, 128, 152, 157, 169, 180–82, 195 Antepartum (Kelly), 3–5, 7, 155, 205n1 antihumanism: conceptual art and, 10; missing freedom to turn for the antihumanist subject, 77–78; shared investment between conceptualism and structuralism, 11–13; spectacle of discourse and, 13; term use in structuralism, 18–19 arbitrary, the, concept of: affect and, 22; image of the grid and, 60; “the motivated” and, 20, 79; nature of systems and standards and, 94–96, 217n46; signifiers and, 20, 22, 83, 94–99, 201, 203

230

in de x Armajani, Siah, 48 Armstrong, Nancy, 220n20 Artforum (journal), 14–15, 64, 92 Art Strike Against Racism, War, and Repression, 51–52, 90 Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Bryan-Wilson), 206n7, 211n29, 217n33, 217n35 attachment, 12, 26, 115, 157, 169, 171, 180, 201, 204, 223n9, 224–25n16 Baker, George, 125–27 Bal, Mieke, 207n14 Balibar, Étienne, 14, 57, 89, 157, 182, 216n30 Barry, Robert, 35, 36, 199–200 Barthes, Roland, 9, 12, 16, 55, 58, 59, 64, 89, 213n50 Battcock, Gregory, 37 being after: belatedness in Post-Partum Document and, 9, 157, 177–83; Krauss’s “expanded field” paradigm and, 127–28 being thrown and belatedness in Post-Partum Document, 181, 183–98 belatedness: affect and conditions of, 23, 24; Althusser’s subject and, 19, 78, 80; condition of “being-after” in Post-Partum Document, 9, 157, 177–83; condition of “being thrown” in Post-Partum Document, 181, 183–98; Krauss’s “expanded field” paradigm and, 127–28; problem of belatedness of subjectivity in structuralism, 9, 157; relevance of the expanded field to, 127–28, 151 Belson, Jordan, 138 Benglis, Lynda, 5 Berger, Maurice, 211n29, 217n33 Blind Time drawings (Morris), 76, 98f, 101f; the body as an arbiter of the drawing system, 106–7; connection between the search for the motivated and gestures of turning away, 97–99; function of the hands in the drawings and Morris’s structural order, 102–5; number

of drawings created, 100, 218n58; process used, 100; turning of the task of drawing outward in the second series, 112–16; writing connected to drawing in, 107, 111, 216n62 Blind Time II (Morris): Morris’s conflicts with his collaborator, 115–16; turning of the task of drawing outward in, 112–16 Blind Time V: Melancholia (Morris), 104f, 105 body, the: affect and the practice of immanent externality, 21–22, 24; expansion of depicted by a functionalist grid, 186–87, 188, 196; Kelly’s picturing of mother and son in Post-Partum Document, 164, 166, 180, 184–88, 192, 195– 96; in Morris’s work, 21–22, 79–80, 87, 93, 100, 101f, 105–11, 115–16; waiting theme in Kelly’s Antepartum, 3–5; the way through the symbolic as seen by Kelly and, 200–201 Boomerang (Holt and Serra), 5 Box for Standing (Morris), 80 Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (Morris), 76 Bruss, Elizabeth W., 12–13 Bryan-Wilson, Julia, 206n7, 211n29, 217n33, 217n35 Bryson, Norman, 127 Buchloh, Benjamin, 7, 10, 23, 58, 87, 213n50 Bunn, Charles William, 145f Burnham, Jack, 199, 210n23 Butler, Judith, 150, 152, 196, 226n42 Callahan, Michael, 137 Cambodia, 48 Card File (Morris), 76, 79, 83, 84–85f Carrier, David, 219n6 Centers (Acconci), 5 Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Lee), 15, 211n32 Clark, T. J., 59, 212n44

in de x Closed Gallery: The Gallery Will Be Closed (Barry), 36 “Company of Us, The” (USCO), 137 Conceptual Art (Stimson), 206n7, 206n10, 226n37 Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects (exhibition), 35, 52, 206n12 Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice (Corris), 9 conceptualism: Antepartum and, 3–5, 7, 205n6; description and approach to studying, 7–9, 206n7; disavowal of the visual in art, 32–33, 210n7; discourse of failure surrounding, 183; investment in antihumanism, 11–13; Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” as conceptualist in its rhetoric, 8; Lacan as a conceptualist, 171, 225n18; strategies and figures associated with, 8; structuralism and, 9–12; telepathic fantasy of Melville and, 198–99 Corris, Michael, 9, 206n12 Course in General Linguistics (Saussure), 17 Criqui, Jean-Pierre, 218n58 crystal, the: crystalline materiality of Smithson’s work, 150; relevance of the crystal to the structuralist turn, 143, 145–46; significance of crystallography for Smithson, 142–43, 144f, 145, 222n59 Crystals: Their Role in Nature and Science (Bunn), 145f “Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The” (Jameson), 22 Davidson, Donald, 79 Dawson, I. M., 145f “Death of the Author, The” (Barthes), 213n50, 219n6 Deleuze, Gilles, 182 Delmar, Rosalind, 183 Derrida, Jacques, 16, 18, 86, 141 DEW-LINE newsletters, 45, 46f Dial-A-Poem (Giorno), 211n33 Dibbets, Jan, 39, 42, 43

Dictionary of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Contraception, 195 “Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism” (Owens), 203 “Documentation I” (Kelly), 157, 158f, 161f, 186, 188f “Documentation II” (Kelly), 157, 159f, 166, 167f “Documentation III” (Kelly), 67f, 157, 160f “Documentation V” (Kelly): adoption of On Growth and Form in, 174, 176f; castration anxiety story told by, 166; child’s questioning of “What am I?” in, 192–95; evidence of feminism and conceptualism in, 184–85; photos of, 168f, 175f, 191f “Documentation VI” (Kelly), 162f; discussion of language and the entry into the symbolic in, 177–80; language and the meaningfulness of the signifier in “X is for X . . .” 201–3 Dosse, François, 16, 17, 69, 97 Double Negative (Heizer), 121 Drawing for Leaning Strata (Smithson), 146–47, 148f Drawing Is Another Kind of Language (Lee), 212n42 Drawings of Robert Morris (Krens), 218n58 dream of the information world: approach to showing how the visual matters, 34–35; artistic strategy of withdrawal, withholding, disavowal, 32–33, 37, 210n7; being in and of the grid, 65–69, 214n67; disavowal of the visual in art, 32–33, 210n7; “information,” “language,” and “the world” as key terms for, 35–37; “information,” “language,” and “the world” considered in relation to LeWitt’s Untitled, 34–35; informationthemed art exhibition (see Information exhibition); Lacan discussed in relation to, 171, 225n18; structure as defined by Piaget, 31–32; structure in LeWitt’s grid drawing, 29–34

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in de x Duchamp, Marcel, 76, 83, 89, 92, 94–95, 96, 97 Dufrenne, Mikel, 91 Durant, Sam, 127 Durkee, Steve, 137 Dwan Gallery, 29, 68 Eagleton, Terry, 57 “Earthwords” (Owens), 141 East Coast/West Coast (Holt and Smithson), 139–41 Elementary Structures of Kinship (LéviStrauss), 16, 61f, 214n67 Elements of Semiology (Barthes), 89 Elkins, James, 207n14 Entropic Pole (Smithson), 146, 222n78 “Entropy and the New Monuments” (Smithson), 145 “Establishment, The” (Smithson), 86 Expanded Cinema (Youngblood), 136–37 expanded field, the: crystalline materiality of Smithson’s work as rejoinder to the structuralist worldview, 150; deployment of the concept in the work of other scholars, 220n24; deployment of the term “expansion” by Krauss, 136, 138–39; expansion applied to cultural forces in the 1960s, 136–38; historicist art history, 119–20; impact of Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” essay, 120–21, 125–27, 219n8; Krauss’s rendering of sculpture as a signifier, 132, 136; Leaning Strata’s relationship to Krauss’s essay, 146–50; myths of, 220n24; principle of the arbitrariness of the signifier in Post-Partum Document, 203; question of how the art world will emerge from the expanded field, 127–28; question of how to liberate the figure of turning, 151–52; relevance of Smithson’s crystal to the structuralist turn, 143–46; relevance to belatedness, 128; semiotic square developed by Greimas, 121, 123, 124f, 150; semiotic square deployed by

Jameson, 121, 124, 220n15; semiotic square generation by Krauss, 123–24, 220n20; significance of crystallography for Smithson and, 142–43, 144f, 145, 222n59; Smithson and Holt’s parody of “systems” in East Coast/West Coast, 139–41; Smithson’s position as the key transition figure between modern and postmodern art, 141–42; structuralist model discussing shallowness in a work of art, 131–32, 221n36; structuralist view of the meaning of all objects as deployed by Krauss, 120, 219n6; trope of the turn, 152; turn toward structuralism in Krauss’s essay, 128–29, 131 “Experimentum Mentis V” (Kelly), 185–86 Fanon, Frantz, 5 fantasmatic, 11, 35 Fashion System, The (Barthes), 89 Flatley, Jonathan, 62–64 Flesh of My Flesh (Silverman), 208n43 Forti, Simone, 76 Foucault, Michel, 9, 16, 58, 89, 130, 216n30 Freud, Sigmund, 23–25, 99, 166, 169, 218n55, 224–25n16 “Gaze in the Expanded Field, The” (Bryson), 127 Giorno, John, 211n33 Girard, René, 16 Goodman, Nelson, 206n14 Graham, Dan, 55, 56f, 57 Greenberg, Clement, 23 Greimas, A. J., 16, 121, 136 grid, the: affect and, 87; Barthes’s stocking metaphor and the image of, 59–60; being in and of the grid in the information world, 60, 65–69, 214n67; in the conceptualist and structuralist worldview, 9; expansion of the body depicted by Kelly’s functionalist grid, 186–87, 188, 196; feminist sexuality in Kelly’s

in de x functionalist grid, 198; field of ideas represented by the word “information” and, 44, 45, 48, 55; image of a closed system, 60, 65–69; imagery of imprisonment in an information world and, 61–62, 64; in Lacan’s description of language, 173; language conceptualized as, 58, 59; in Leaning Strata, 147; Massumi’s notion of affect as occurring in the gaps of, 24, 87, 186, 196; pairing of Kelly’s child’s questions with Thompson’s grid, 185, 196–98; structure in LeWitt’s drawing, 29–34; the unconscious and, 169; the way through the symbolic as seen by Kelly, 200 Grids Grids Grids Grids . . . (Lippard), 60 Grossberg, Lawrence, 91 Haacke, Hans, 11, 52, 54, 187, 188f, 211n32 Harrison, Charles, 210n7 Harrison, Margaret, 187, 188f Heizer, Michael, 121 History Group, 183 “History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline, The” (Panofsky), 77 Hobbs, Robert, 146 Holt, Nancy, 5, 122f, 138f, 139 Huebler, Douglas, 33 humanism, 77, 92, 97, 120. See also antihumanism Hunt, Kay, 187, 188f Hyppolite, Jean, 16 I-Box (Morris), 80, 81f “Iconography and Iconology” (Panofsky), 73, 76 Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Mitchell), 207n14 “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (Althusser), 19, 78, 157 immanent externality, 89, 182 information: anti-visual nature of conceptualist strategies, 7; being in and of the grid in the information world, 60,

65–69, 214n67; “information,” “language,” and “the world” as key terms for conceptualism, 35–37; “information,” “language,” and “the world” in LeWitt’s Untitled, 34–35; management of affect and, 22–24, 209n62; political expression in Lippard’s Information show catalogue entry, 62, 64; political expression in the “structure of affiliation” in LeWitt’s Cubes, 62–64; as presented in Information (see Information exhibition); structuralist imagery of imprisonment in an information world, 58, 60–62, 213nn57–58; world as a total sign system and (see dream of the information world) Information exhibition, 20, 34; absence of sensation in the exhibitions, 55, 56f, 57; artists’ embracing of the rhetoric of technology, 44–48, 210n23; artists’ group’s protest against U.S. war actions, 48, 51–52, 53f; claims made of repressiveness of systems of information, 52–54; critical reviews, 65; exhibition catalogue cover, 45–47, 211n25; exploration of “information” as structure, 44, 210n23; field of ideas represented by the word “information,” 55; fundamental query about art, 41, 44; motivation behind the exhibit, 40–44; premise of, 37; representation of the aesthetic of information as a structure by Armajani, 48, 49–51f; significance of the grid and, 66–69; structuralism’s principles illustrated by, 57–58; theme of the world as a sign system, 65; variety of the installations, 39–40; works of art used to politicize the museum, 51–54, 211n33 infrastructural analysis, 44 International Association of Word and Image Studies, 206n14 Jackson, Matthew Jesse, 88 Jackson Pollock Bar, 88

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in de x Jakobson, Roman, 164 Jameson, Fredric, 22, 60, 121, 124f, 213n57, 214n58, 220n15 Jewish Museum, 210n23 Johnston, Jill, 216n29 Kallipoliti, Lydia, 126f Kelly, Mary: activism regarding women’s oppression, 183–84; affect of indifference presented in Post-Partum Document, 204; conflict regarding clarifying the social order of things for her son, 187–88, 192; idea of the grid and, 66; picturing of mother and son in Post-Partum Document, 164, 166, 180, 184–88, 192, 195–96; psychoanalytic readings of the mother/son photograph, 165–68, 223–24nn8–11; purported preference for language over the visual, 164–65; turning and, 19, 20–22; waiting theme in Antepartum, 3–5; the way through the symbolic as seen by, 200–201. See also Antepartum; Post-Partum Document Kent State University, 48, 51, 90 Klein Group, 129 Kosuth, Joseph, 33, 44 Kozloff, Max, 64–65 Kramer, Hilton, 65 Krauss, Rosalind, 19, 20, 25; deployment of the term “expansion,” 136, 138–39; generation of the semiotic square, 123–24, 220n20; impact of “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 120–21, 125–27, 219n8; inspiration for “expanded field” diagram, 121, 123; Leaning Strata’s relevance to her essay, 146–50; myths associated with historicist art history, 119–20; Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, 92, 119–20; rendering of sculpture as a signifier, 132, 136; structuralist model discussing shallowness in a work of art, 131–32, 221n36; structuralist view of the meaning of all objects, 120, 219n6

Krens, Thomas, 218n58 Kubler, George, 79 Kuspit, Donald, 33 Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (Berger), 211n29, 217n33 Lacan, Jacques, 5, 16; attachment to science, 169, 171, 223n9, 224–25n16; as a conceptualist, 171, 225n18; diagram of the psyche, 169, 170f; discussion of Schema L, 172–73; interest in systems and language, 9, 213n48; on the notion of structure, 17; Saussurean algorithm, 66, 67; structuralist views of the signifier, 59, 61, 66, 212n34 language: conceptualist turns in Lacan’s view of the science of language, 171– 73, 225n18; conceptualized as a grid, 9, 58, 59; “information,” “language,” and “the world” as key terms for conceptualism, 35–37; “information,” “language,” and “the world” in LeWitt’s Untitled, 34–35; Kelly’s preference for language over the visual, 164–65; Kelly’s record of her child’s emergence into language and the social order, 177–80; limits to language as an organizing principle for inquiries into the visual arts, 10, 206–7n14; meaningfulness of the signifier in “X is for X . . .” and, 201–3; questioning what “language” stands for using structuralism, 58, 212n42; structuralist linguistics established as a model for a science of man, 15–16; theory of the differential sign by Saussure, 57–58; understanding language systems in visual art using structuralism, 50, 58–59, 213n48 Languages of Art (Goodman), 206n14 Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (symposium), 16, 86, 141 Laplanche, Jean, 192 Lauretano, Michael, 211n26 Leaning Strata (Smithson), 146–50, 223n81

in de x Lee, Pamela, 15, 211n32, 212n42 Les Mots et les choses (Foucault), 16 Lévi-Strauss, Claude: diagramming of families, 60, 61f, 214n67; interest in systems and language, 9, 16; on the notion of structure, 17 LeWitt, Sol: disavowal of the visual in art, 32–33, 210n7; Dwan Gallery announcement, 68f; information in Untitled, 66, 69; interpretations of his cube structure, 62–64; Smithson on LeWitt’s sepia handwriting, 145–46; structure in the grid drawing, 29–34 Li, Victor, 99 Lippard, Lucy, 3, 39, 60, 61–62, 64, 165, 200, 205n6 Litanies (Morris), 76 Liu, Alan, 141 Loos, Adolf, 131–32 Lovekin, David, 213n57 Machine, The: As Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (exhibition), 210n23 Massumi, Brian, 24, 87, 186, 196 McLuhan, Marshall, 45, 60, 211n25 McShine, Kynaston, 20, 37, 40 Melville, Stephen, 198–99 Memory Drawings (Morris): Morris’s version of “the world” and, 111–12, 219n66; search for “the motivated” in, 107–11; writing, drawing, and turning away, 111 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 35, 79, 93 Metz, Christian, 11 Mirror Displacements in the Yucatan (Smithson), 141 Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (Roberts), 142 Miss, Mary, 128, 129f, 130f, 131, 132, 133– 35f, 137f Mitchell, Juliet, 83, 183, 207n14 modernism, 24, 120, 141, 203, 205n6, 212n44 “Modernism, Postmodernism, and Steam” (Clark), 212n44

MoMA Poll (Haacke), 52, 54f, 211n32 Morgenstern, Oskar, 44 Morris, Robert, 19, 20, 21, 121; affective dimension of his work, 79, 88, 91–92; Box for Standing, 80; Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, 76; characteristics of his experimentation with systems, 87; comment on “the signifier,” 66; conflicts with his collaborator in Blind Time II drawings, 115–16; critique of subjectivity, 80–83; drawings done with his eyes closed (see Blind Time drawings); early dance and performance work, 76; I-Box, 80, 81f; ironic look at systems in Card File, 76, 79, 83, 84–85f; Litanies, 76; Passageway, 80; performance of Panofsky’s essay, 73–76; Performer Switch, 76; phenomenological concerns about systems and movement, 92–94; political activities denouncing art as a corrupt system, 89–91; purposeful failure to represent the object and subject of systems, 87; review of 21.3, 216n29; sculptural explorations, 80; search for “the motivated,” 97–99, 107–11, 128; Self-Portrait (EEG), 80, 82f, 87; “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making,” 92, 94; statement about humanism in 21.3, 73–76, 77, 87; Untitled Column, 80; use of systems, 79; view of “the world,” 79, 111–12, 219n66 motivated, the: connection between a search for and gestures of turning away, 97–99; connection with the arbitrary, 20, 79; humanist perspective suggested by, 97; meaning behind describing a signifier as motivated, 96; Morris’s phenomenological concerns about systems and movement and, 92–94; Morris’s search for, 97–99, 107–11, 128 movement and motivation, 92–94, 96–97

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in de x Mulvey, Laura, 183 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, NY), 20, 34, 37, 210n23 Nassau County Museum of Fine Arts, Long Island, 132 National Women’s Liberation Movement, 157, 183 “Network: The Art World Described as a System” (Alloway), 14 New York Cultural Center, 52 Ngai, Sianne, 24, 88, 216n27 Now (Benglis), 5 Number Between Zero and One, A (Armajani), 48, 49–51f On Growth and Form (Thompson), 174, 176f, 196 Onorato, Ronald, 132 Order of Things, The (Foucault), 16 Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, The (Krauss), 92, 119–20 Owens, Craig, 141, 203, 223n8 Panofsky, Erwin, 73, 77 Papapetros, Spyros, 127 Parables for the Virtual (Massumi), 196 Partially Buried Woodshed (Smithson), 141, 150, 151f Passageway (Morris), 80 Patterson, Elizabeth, 137 Paxton, Steve, 74 Performer Switch (Morris), 76 Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys (Miss), 128, 129f, 130f, 131, 132, 133–35f, 137f Phenomenology of Perception (MerleauPonty), 93 “Photography’s Expanded Field” (Baker), 125–27 Piaget, Jean, 17, 31, 59 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 77 Picture Theory (Mitchell), 207n14 Piper, Adrian, 35, 37

Political Unconscious, The (Jameson), 121 Pontus Hultén, K. G., 210n23 Posato, John, 43 postmodernism, 8, 18, 22, 121, 127, 141, 151, 203, 212n44 Post-Partum Document (Kelly), 3–5, 6f, 21, 156f; adoption of On Growth and Form in “Documentation V,” 174, 176f; affective dimension of, 12; affect management displayed in “Statistical Tables and Index,” 195; affect of indifference presented by Kelly, 204; Althusser’s turning by a subject applied to, 180– 82; approach to documenting Kelly’s son, 157–64; castration complex story told by “Experimentum Mentis V,” 185–86; child’s questioning of “What am I?” in “Documentation V,” 192–95; comment on structuralism inherent in, 66, 177; depiction of anxiety in the mother’s feeding records, 187; embracing of complexity and science, 175, 177; evidence of feminism and conceptualism in “Documentation V,” 184–85; exhibition history, 223n1; expansion of the body depicted by a functionalist grid, 186–87, 188, 196; feminist sexuality in Kelly’s functionalist grid, 198; feminist theory and the significance of bodies, 186, 226n42; Kelly’s activism regarding women’s oppression, 183– 84; Kelly’s conflict regarding clarifying the social order of things for her son, 187–88, 192; Kelly’s purported preference for language over the visual, 164– 65; Lacan’s attachment to science and, 169, 171, 223n9, 224–25n16; Lacan’s Schema L and, 172–73; meaning of the signifier in “X is for X . . . ,” 201–3; offering of her child’s excrement as a signifier by Kelly, 186–87; pairing of the child’s questions with Thompson’s grid, 185, 196–98; principle of the arbitrariness of the signifier and, 203;

in de x psychoanalysis and the antihumanist turn, 169; psychoanalytic readings of the mother/son photograph, 165–68, 223–24nn8–11; record of her child’s emergence into language and the social order in “Documentation VI,” 177–80; Schema L used to depict loss, 173–74; structuralist element of belatedness inherent in the exhibit, 182–83; treatment of the “subject,” 157; the way through the symbolic as seen by Kelly, 200–201 poststructuralism, 8, 13–14, 18, 79, 226n42 Pouillon, Jean, 16 Primapara (Kelly), 164 Primitive Culture (Tylor), 214n67 Prison-House of Language (Jameson), 213n57 Quaternary Field/Associative Diagram (Durant), 127 Rastier, François, 121 Ratcliff, Carter, 65 Reconsidering the Object of Art (exhibition), 198–99 Reid, Martin, 218n62 Retracing the Expanded Field (symposium), 126, 127 Robert Morris: Blind Time Drawings (Criqui), 218n58 Roberts, Jennifer, 141, 142 Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism (Carrier), 121 Rosolato, Guy, 16 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 17, 57, 59, 60, 94, 95, 203 Saussurean algorithm (Lacan), 67 Schema L (Lacan), 172–73 “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (Krauss). See expanded field, the Self-Portrait (EEG) (Morris), 80, 82f, 87 Sémantique structurale (Greimas), 121

semiotic square: developed by Greimas, 121, 123, 124f, 150; generation of by Krauss, 123–24, 220n20; poster for Retracing the Expanded Field symposium, 126; used by Jameson, 124, 220n15 Serial Project #1 (ABCD) (LeWitt), 29, 31f Serra, Richard, 5, 58 Service Area (Acconci), 39, 41 Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings (Haacke), 187, 188f Shaw, Lytle, 145 signifier, the: arbitrary nature of, 20, 22, 83, 94–99, 201, 203; Krauss’s commentary on sculpture as a signifier, 132, 136; Lacan’s structuralist views of, 59, 61, 66; Morris’s comment on “the signifier,” 66; motivation and, 96; structuralist views of, 55, 212n34 Silverman, Kaja, 11, 207n22, 208n43, 219n66 Singerman, Howard, 10 Smith, Paul, 182 Smithson, Robert, 11, 20, 138f; crystalline materiality of his work, 150; East Coast/ West Coast, 139–41; Entropic Pole, 146, 222n78; “Entropy and the New Monuments,” 145; “The Establishment,” 86; invoking of systems, 21–22; on laughter, 152; Leaning Strata and the expanded field, 146–50, 223n81; on LeWitt’s print, 33; Mirror Displacements in the Yucatan, 141; “nightmare” of a systematic world picture as seen by, 66, 86–87; parody of “systems” in East Coast/West Coast, 139–41; Partially Buried Woodshed, 141, 150, 151f; position as the key transition figure between modern and postmodern art, 141–42; relevance of the crystal to the structuralist turn, 143–46; significance of crystallography for, 142–43, 144f, 145, 222n59; Spiral Jetty, 121, 122f, 141 Software, Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art, 210n23

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in de x “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making” (Morris), 92, 94 Soper, Kate, 11 Spiral Jetty (Smithson), 121, 122f, 141 “Statistical Tables and Index” (Kelly), 185, 192, 195 Stern, Gerd, 137 Stimson, Blake, 206n7, 206n10, 226n37 “Straight Information” (Posato), 43 structuralism: academic symposium exploring, 16–17; “antihumanism” term use, 18–19; comment on inherent in Post-Partum Document, 180–82; conceptualism and, 9–12; condition of “being-after” and, 9; crystalline materiality of Smithson’s work vs. the structuralist worldview, 150; current state of the field, 13; historical accounts of, 206n13; image of the grid as a closed system, 60, 65–69; imagery of imprisonment in an information world, 58, 60–62, 213nn57–58; Krauss’s structuralist model and the notion of shallowness in a work of art, 131–32, 221n36; “nightmare” of a systematic world picture as seen by Smithson, 86–87; political expression in Lippard’s information parody, 62, 64; political expression in the “structure of affiliation” in LeWitt’s Cubes, 62–64; poststructuralism vs., 13–14; principle of binary opposition, 60; principle of difference and affectivity, 203–4; problem of belatedness of subjectivity, 9; questioning what “language” stands for using, 58, 212n42; relevance of the crystal to the structuralist turn, 143–46; seminal events in 1966, 16–17; semiotic square developed by Greimas, 121, 123, 124f; shared investment in antihumanism with conceptualism, 11–13; spectacle of discourse and, 13; systems and structures and (see systems and structures); terms, concepts, and modes used by,

14, 17–19; theory of the differential sign by Saussure, 57–58; turning and, 19, 128–29, 208n43; understanding language systems in visual art using, 50, 58–59, 213n48; understanding “the world” using, 79; view of the meaning of all objects introduced by Krauss, 120, 219n6 Structural Semantics (Greimas), 16 Sun Tunnels (Holt), 122f symbolic, the, 199–201, 234n10 System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange (Wilden), 15 systems and structures: academic symposium exploring structuralism, 16–17, 86; affect’s role in Morris’s art systems, 79, 91–92; artists’ commentaries on the arbitrary nature of systems and standards, 94–96, 217n46; Blind Time drawings and (see Blind Time drawings); call to describe the art world as a system, 14–15, 207n25; characteristics of Morris’s experimentation with systems, 87; claims made of repressiveness of systems of information, 52–54; critique of subjectivity by Morris, 80–83; ironic look at systems in Card File, 80–83, 84–85f; Morris’s phenomenological concerns about systems and movement, 92–94; Morris’s political activities denouncing art as a corrupt system, 89–91; “nightmare” of a systematic world picture as seen by Smithson, 86–87; parody of “systems” in East Coast/West Coast, 139–41; structuralist linguistics established as a model for a science of man, 15–16; structure as defined by Piaget, 31–32; systems vs. structures, 17; uses and meanings of the terms, 17–18; view of structures in structuralism, 59–60 telepathic fantasy of Melville, 198–99 Telepathic Piece (Barry), 199–200

in de x Terada, Rei, 23, 24 theory of transformations, 197, 198 Thompson, D. W., 174, 185, 196 Thread Waste (Morris), 121 Three Standard Stoppages (Duchamp), 94–95 Todorov, Tzvetan, 16 Total Information Awareness program, 35 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein), 96 turning around, turning away: affect and the practice of immanent externality, 89, 216n30; Althusser’s turning by a subject applied to Kelly’s Post-Partum Document, 180–82; artists’ commentaries on the arbitrary nature of systems and standards, 94–96, 217n46; concept of affect as a moving quantity, 99; connection between a search for the motivated and gestures of turning away, 97–99; depiction of a street encounter by Panofsky, 73; humanism as characterized by Panofsky, 77; humanist perspective suggested by motivation, 97; meaning behind describing a signifier as motivated, 96; Merleau-Ponty’s cube and his view of perception, 93–94; missing freedom to turn for the antihumanist subject, 77–78; Morris’s concept of “the motivated” and, 97–99; “nightmare” of a systematic world picture as seen by Smithson, 86–87; question of how to liberate the figure of turning, 151–52; resilience of affect, 87; in Robert Morris’s work (see Morris, Robert); structuralism and, 19, 128–29,

208n43; the subject’s embracing of being turned away, 92; term use, 19; turning as described by Silverman, 208n43; turn toward structuralism in Krauss’s “Sculpture” essay, 128–29, 131 21.3 (Morris), 73–76, 77, 87, 216n29 Tylor, E. B., 214n67 Untitled (LeWitt), 29, 34, 66, 68, 69 Untitled Column (Morris), 80 USCO (“The Company of Us”), 137 Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (LeWitt), 62–64 Vietnam War, 7, 90 Wagner, Anne M., 23, 129, 136 “Waiting” (Wilding), 5 Weiner, Lawrence, 33 Whitney Museum, 91, 217n32 Wilden, Anthony, 15, 17 Wilding, Faith, 5 Williams, Richard J., 206n12 Withdrawal Statement (Piper), 35 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 79, 95–96 Womanhouse (exhibition), 5 Women and Work (Kelly, Hunt, Harrison), 187, 188f World Spectators (Silverman), 207n22, 219n66 Writing Degree Zero (Barthes), 16 “X is for X . . .” (Kelly), 201–3 Youngblood, Gene, 136, 138

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