On January 2, 1967, in the city of love, beauty, art, and sensuality, four provocateurs, named Buron, Masset, Parmentier, and Toroni, declared that, “Inasmuch as to paint is a function of aestheticism, flowers, women, eroticism, the daily environment, art, dada, psychoanalysis, the war in Vietnam, WE ARE NOT PAINTERS.” The next day, they withdrew from the Paris Salon because, among other reasons, “Painting is by nature objectively reactionary.”

Surely everyone has heard by now, forty-seven years later, that “painting is dead.” Even a curator in a small gallery in the largest city in rural Vermont was in the know enough in 2010 to inform a group of visiting college students that, “a paintbrush is just a stick with dead hairs on it,” saving them just in time from imminent embarrassment; a few slipped out to their studios during lunch and discarded the evidence of their naiveté, and became — ta da! — up-to-date, sophisticated, and post-postmodern, no longer weighed down by the physical trappings of artistry, nor its technical travails — but possibly also not bothering to stop to ask questions about the origins of this rejection of aestheticism, flowers, women, environment, art, &c., or the uncategorical embrace of the abstract disembodied conceptualism that took its place.  

Running the risk, therefore, of being accused of provincialism, conservatism, or — worse still — some lack of hipness, I suggest we ask some questions about the dangers and delights of de-materialization, and trace some historical parallels to its ideological trappings. While I find myself arguing for a creative union between concepts and materiality in art, I am also aware that another less tangible criterion lies beneath my call for re-materialization, one that looks for a sense of ritual in art, a reverence and a sense of wonder in response to the beauty and the horror of the material and spiritual world. This would be an art, conceptual or material, that engages in an earnest exploration of meaning and that is an attempt at translation, transmission, communication from one human being to another, an art that is activated by — to use an old-fashioned and certainly sentimental word — love.  While on the surface, the presence or absence of love in a work of art might seem wholly unrelated to the proportion of corporeality and conceptuality contained in it, I imagine that materiality matters just as much to art as it matters in romantic relationships; that is, it matters quite a bit, although it is not everything. And while it is best not to put the love object up on a pedestal — better, usually, to see the beloved as an active subject rather than an object — when it comes to the art object, a pedestal might actually serve a functionally significant purpose: as margin, as separation from the world of chaotic everything, as ritual entry point or magic portal into another kind of experience. 

An artist friend of mine, who weaves and paints and sews and creates embodied performance pieces — but who is also a fine analytical and conceptual thinker and writer — has a reminder pinned up on the wall of her art studio announcing “The Failure of the Object.” While I think I understand her desire to curb or hone her aesthetic practice with the edge of thought, it makes me wonder what the object’s failed mission allegedly was. Having read postmodern critiques of Modernism’s belief in “aesthetic redemption,” I assume the object was being accused of naively attempting — and failing — to redeem the world, right the wrongs, educate and challenge suffering and blind humanity, which may also be a veiled accusation against the art object’s more serious crime: attempting to be beautiful. Since all of the great art of the preceding centuries had not managed to definitively remove misery from the world or make us unerringly compassionate or equally beautiful, a new art movement was born, and blossomed for about six years in the late 1960s, that aimed to succeed where the pathetic useless object (the painting, the sculpture, the tapestry) had not. If not aesthetic redemption, it might, at best, have been aiming at moral or social reform — or else, at worst, a cynical and ironic hopelessness. Lucy Lippard, in her epoch-making collocation, 6 Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, &c…, explained that this new movement aimed to both “de-materialize and de-mythologize” art and that its works often consisted of little more than documentary evidence of ephemeral happenings, lists of words, instructions for the viewer or participant, or, as in the case of one artist by the name of Keith Arnatt (1969) of a musing on the question: “Is it Possible for Me to Do Nothing as My Contribution to This Exhibition.”

In a quoted excerpt by Lippard and John Chandler from “The Dematerialization of Art,” originally published in Art International in 1968,  we read, “During the 1960s the anti-intellectual emotional intuitive processes of art-making characteristic of the last two decades have begun to give way to an ultra-conceptual art that emphasizes the thinking process almost exclusively… a number of artists are losing interest in the physical evolution of the work of art… provoking a profound dematerialization of art, especially of art as object, and if it continues to prevail, it may result in the object’s becoming wholly obsolete.” In a letter to Lippard and Chandler in response to this article, the Art Language Group of Coventry concurred, saying that in the art of the period, “the idea is ‘read about’ rather than ‘looked at’… [and suggesting that] art should produce a material entity only as a necessary by-product of the need to record the idea…” While we might view all works of art as records of the artist’s thinking and feeling process, traceable through the marks or the imprints of the hands or tools used, or — in the case of a manuscript — through the palimpsest of marginalia, erasure, and crossing-out, I suspect that the Art Language Group meant this in a less physical way, allowing only the intellectual “by-products” (a term not by accident taken from the realm of industry) to remain as the detritus of the art event. This was a radical change of aspect for art, but one in a line of evolution from the Platonic rationalist fear of art’s pharmacological powers, to the Hegelian attempt to turn art into philosophy or the Benjaminian prophecy that art would become politics. De-materialization was a distant echo of these earlier incursions on the aesthetic, and in many ways its aims and problems are similar.

Certainly, there are benighted people who still paint, and commercial galleries that serve them, but the truly sophisticated scoff or snigger up their sleeves at such reactionary sentimentalism, at such unscrupulous pandering to the bourgeois market. The sophisticates can wryly sniff at those uneducated hicks who claim that they “don’t get conceptual art”— but there are some legitimate, pressing, and not wholly naive questions raised by the rejection of — or alleged failure of — the art object. Of course — let me just get this out of the way — all art is at least in some measure conceptual, and even so-called conceptual art cannot escape from some materiality or aesthetic character, even if that character is emphatically anti-aesthetic in nature. Let us not forget that all words were once names for objects, or metaphors. The more we remember this, the more our words will bear weight and carry us through space (my colleague Eric Berlin reminds me that the word for metaphor in Latin means “to move,” “to transfer,” and that there are moving vans in Italy with “metafora” written on their sides). So, words too are born of our relationship with the material world and, however they may lift us up into the realms of imagination, they also — at best — bring us back around to earth. Thus, it is not helpful to pit conceptual against aesthetic, or abstract against mimetic, spiritual against material, though we may make general assessments on where a work’s or an epoch’s tendencies lie. 

As discussed in relation to the question of the materiality of the book, anyone who has looked at Medieval art after looking a long time at Greek or Roman art will wonder what happened to the naturalistic facility of the sculptors and painters. Did the Medieval world wake up one morning with a concussion and forget how to depict curves in space and detailed individuality in portraiture? Of course, the flattening of the medieval picture and sculpture is a result, not of a loss of skill, but of a historical and ideological change of emphasis from the externally beautiful and naturalistic to the internal and symbolic, or conceptual, image. That being said, Medieval art never utterly abandoned the sinful pleasures of the sensory world, and corporeality and objecthood was very much at the heart of Christian worship. Art created in an era ruled by Catholicism was aesthetic, but in a different way than that of a humanistic (though still largely religious) era like the Renaissance; while Protestantism’s iconoclasm was clearly veering toward the intellectual and the anesthetic. Blake’s 18th century rejection of positivist realism and “Newton’s curse” in favor of “fourfold vision” is more easily aligned with the conceptual powers of imagination; but he was one of the first heretics to note and to celebrate the fact that the nakedness of woman is the creation of God. Abstract expressionism may be a return to a disinterested art for art’s sake; but de-materialization is a cycling back to a certain kind of iconoclastic protest against matter (and author-ity?). 

Though people may argue that conceptual de-materialism often avails itself of physicality, especially, say, in performance art or the contemporary movement sometimes called “social practice,” there is an important distinction to be made. With the refreshing exception of a certain craft-based, often feminist, conceptual formalism whose very existence is evidence that conceptuality need not engage in a rejection of the body or its hand-made products, the physicality of many conceptual works is often indistinguishable from the objects or movements and arrangements of everyday life. What it looks like is usually less important than what it imparts; or its appearance is consciously casual or inartistic. Further, certain types of conceptual art do feature objects, but often (though not always), this objecthood is consciously ironic, made of plastic or other impermeable materials. Plastic effectively seals itself off from any possible in-spiration of matter by breath, limits the traces left on its surface, the marks of human hands, sweat, scratches, and accidents, diverting participation or interaction by the human maker, and resisting the markings made upon more permeable materials by time or other natural elements. Conceptual art often references popular culture icons and generally is either simply a joke or a critique of materiality. Whether this deconstructing tendency to make everything a joke is inherent in conceptuality or, whether we are dealing rather with a case of two separate elements keeping common cause is not entirely clear to me, since some conceptual art is serious and reverential in nature. But I do suspect that a rejection of materiality is sometimes intrinsic to a general tendency toward irony, or a tendency to look away from the abyss of reality in all its fearsome beauty, danger, disorderliness, and delight. Body–based performance art might be an important exception, as it often deals directly with the challenges and pleasures of embodiment. But it is as ephemeral as the duration of the performance itself, and usually only leaves disembodied traces of its presence.

Conceptual de-materialization and contemporary social practices (both more idealistic movements than plastic pop-art deconstruction), often favor creation by a group over that of an individual artist, or, better yet, accidents of randomness (acts of nature, social repercussions) over deliberate choice or artistry. Sometimes the work is a kind of social experiment, with some minor controls established wherein life can play its irrepressible parts. Lippard’s book itself is an object lesson in collaborative creation, as it is mostly a collection or collage of fragments written by many voices, wherefrom echoes, contradictions, and themes emerge naturally.

This is a democratic impulse, to be sure, and one in harmony with the tendency of de-materialized art to overcome the traditional distance between the viewer and the work of art, and the reverence toward the work of art that went along with that remoteness. This tendency aimed to dissolve the separation between art and reality, choice and randomness, individual artistry and communal cacophony or accidental harmony. While many contemporary artists — taking off from Benjamin’s celebration of the death of the aura and the subsequent destruction of distance and concentration — seem to feel that this confluence of art and life is a positive development, an end to the elite specialization of art, and a democratization of the art experience, I wonder how much the removal of ritual and remoteness has instead contributed to a general debasement of both art and life. 

A more meaningful task than polarizing and categorizing, however, would be to trace some fruitful point of contact between embodiment and de-materialization. This is a call for the re-materialization of the art object, without recourse to dualistic categories of spirit and matter. Art has forever oscillated between its urge to please and its urge to inform — or reform —  between its reliance on and resistance to ideas, its uses and abuses as didactic or merely suggestive. Perhaps it is precisely in the friction that obtains between these poles that art’s value for life lies. But, if objects — like that dead paintbrush — mean nothing but their functional definition, a human being might well be nothing more than a machine for destroying nature; love, a purely mechanical function. 

While I enjoy a good thought experiment as much as the next person, and in no way would want to discourage conceptual provocateurs from prodding, puzzling, or scandalizing the art audience or the general unsuspecting public with ideas that engage us in the problems posed by conceptual dualities such as:  real and ideal, physical and spiritual, materialistic and material, truth and illusion, political justice and corruption, conformity and capitalism,  these sorts of experiments seem to me to serve a very different purpose than sense-based and formalist object art. Such activity can beneficially supplement what sense-based art does, or, indeed, mark out for itself an activity with an entirely different name (activism, criticism, politics, social media), but when it threatens to entirely displace the aesthetic characteristics and powers of the object, as it does today, it is time that we asked questions about what is going on and why. 

Is the need to “get away from the object” not to some degree a nihilistic rejection of the teeming beauties of the world, its colors, textures, shapes, and dynamic juxtapositions? A desire to avoid the messiness and irreducibility of sensuality and its uncontrollable effects on emotions? An art that plays with forms and rhythms, with expanses of space and sudden lyrical gestures, with deeply grooved or emphatically etched markings; an art that images forth the ineffable and irrational processes of the mind, heart and body, is an art, that, as Dickinson had it in reference to poetry, makes us feel as if the top of our head were coming off (she also said that it made her body so cold no fire could warm it); it makes our breath stop, our heart beat faster; it is an art that we feel in the body, not just in the mind, an art that does what analytical philosophy, theory, rationality, discourse cannot do.  Such an art arranges words or images or sounds or silences in such a way that parts of us we did not yet know existed are awakened, and when we encounter such breath-taking formal choreographies, new cells in our bodies are generated, and what was, one moment before, dear old normal drear life, is reborn as completely new and alive. 

Formal, physical relationships in art mirror the formal, physical nature of our bodies and the relationships between our bodies and the physical world we live in, and they communicate with the non-verbal, non-rational parts of our brains. Art — an art of words too, if the words are poetic and imagistic, rhythmic or otherwise trance-inducing rather than merely didactic or prosaic — is a sort of silent, mysterious singing that moves below or beyond the conscious intellectual level; it is more than the sum of its parts. It is revelatory and regenerating. It is much more than a one-liner or a direct transmission of an idea or conviction or a message. As Goethe tells us in Faust, “Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, und Grün des Lebens goldner Baum” (Grey, dear friend, is all theory, and green life’s golden tree). How to measure the impact of the sound of the repeated ‘g’s (luckily repeatable in this case through translation), or the tripping, warbling effect of the last three words (not fully reproducible since our word for life does not have a “b” in it); how to add up the seeming senselessness of the tree being both golden and green, or to calculate the effect of the uncertainty of the lacking “is” between the words “green” and “life’s,” except through the senses, which seem to intuitively understand such contradictions and textures as higher truths?! 

The work of art, especially if it is an object, is the perfect marriage between idea and materiality, spirit and matter. Born of an idea and manifested in an object or some material organization, it has the power to translate that idea into a language of forms, shapes, rhythms and other irreducible elements that can communicate to another person. That person then, activated by the idea embodied in the formal arrangement, turns around and re-engages with reality, seeing it in new ways and changing it forever. So why should materiality be seen as something frivolous, seducing us away from “higher” spiritual concerns? I suspect it has something to do with the way we have come to conflate pejorative “materialism” with materiality. 

Along with materialism and commodity, a purely conceptual art strains to discard or neglect materiality. When spirit is left alone without body or materiality, it is very hard to see or feel. It is precisely when physicality is abandoned by spirit that it becomes nothing but materialism: a sort of commodity fetish or form of pornography, which is very much where we stand as a culture today. We worship bodies that are beautiful and often fake, and shiny metal machines, but this worship is fatally far removed from a meaningful aesthetic experience engaged with ethical response, an experience that changes or motivates our lives toward being more humane or impels us to make the world more beautiful. While de-materialization aims to overcome the problem of empty materialism, it may further aggravate the Cartesian split by giving up on the possibility that some matter (works of art especially) may be bearers of a particularly powerful kind of life-transforming spirit.

The slick Vermont curator’s cynical definition of a paintbrush, as a stick with dead hairs on it, reveals, further, a mechanistic, positivist bent, which is cryptically fueled by Platonic rationalism and intellection; a tendency to reduce all sorts of meaningful beautiful things — objects inhered by spirit — to mere dead tools or objects of use. While art for art’s sake thrived in the late 1800s as a rebellion against Victorian morality, realism, and the rise of industrialization — a slap in the face to the bourgeois marketplace and utilitarian commodification whereby, in Benjamin’s words, things were “freed from the drudgery of being useful” — now, in an age of moral and rational industrial progress where artists are being replaced by technological “makers” of useful gadgets, art for art’s sake is seen as reactionary. This is a subtle switch, and demands closer attention. Somehow beauty and pleasure were appropriated by industry and advertising and became commodity fetishes. By denying ourselves the pleasures and perils of beauty, we have been robbed of at least half of what makes human life meaningful. In return we get only a simulated sense of ethical purity and a few laughs. 

While I am fascinated with the really metaphysical question of whether ideas need to be manifested or just thought or uttered to be real (why do we need to make things at all, when it would be much simpler to just describe them?), and also sympathetic to de-materialism’s aim to de-commodify the art object and rescue the artistic impulse from the mercenary clutches of art dealers and galleries, I am curious and concerned about the way de-materialization is paired by Lucy Lippard with de-mythologization. One might presume that these two terms are opposites, as materialism could be linked to positivism and science, while mythologization might seem rather to belong to the realm of the irrational and mystical. Their pairing reveals the complex and subtle origin of the metaphysical flight from the real, which in this case has banished both materiality and mystery at once by separating matter from spirit and robbing matter of its magic. 

Confusions about the nature of the real and the metaphysical are as prevalent today as they were in Kant’s day (if less carefully analyzed), when his readers were divided on the question of whether the great philosopher was writing as a materialist or an idealist when he posited that the mind is not a blank slate taking objective imprints of the external world. Instead, he argued, the objects of the physical world are processed as subjective phenomena by a priori categories and structures of the mind. Was Kant a materialist or an idealist, then? The answer to this question is that it is the wrong question. There can be no separation between matter and spirit, mind and sense experiences, only an interaction between structures in our brains and external phenomena. And Kant himself, in explaining the difference between his type of transcendental idealism and that of pure idealists, wrote — first of the pure idealists: “The theorem of all true idealists, from the Eleatic school to Bishop Berkeley, can be summed up in this formula: all knowledge through sensation and experience is nothing but mere appearance, and truth can only be found in the ideas of pure reason and rationality” — and then of his own sort: “The fundamental theorem that rules and establishes my idealism is, in contrast: all knowledge of things from mere pure reason or pure rationality is nothing but mere appearance, and truth is only to be found in experience.” That Kant’s materialism is at once a special kind of idealism — one that maintains that the conceptions or categories of the mind determine, arrange, and limit what our senses communicate to us, may be hard to grasp. But within that grappling is an inkling of the way de-materialism is an extreme and unnatural case of abstract intellection and metaphysical posing. When we remove the physical, we are building castles in the air, and even that arch-transcendentalist Thoreau reminded his readers that such castles needed foundations beneath them. Kant wanted to clarify what could and could not be talked about, measured, known; but that did not mean that he wanted to reduce the world or human experience to what could be rationally explained — he defended ethics and religion, and was an early advocate of art for art’s sake. Wittgenstein is another important and confusing marker of this paradox: his careful, philosophical examination of the limits of logical language and the limits of our ability to fully know the world of phenomena through rationality led him to poetry — images, formal arrangement, irreducible mystery — as the only possible medium to communicate what otherwise could not be spoken. 

While de-materialization may seem spiritual, then, it is in truth more related to a pure Idealist tendency toward practicality, utility, and morality than to an impulse toward a thrilling coincidence of opposites, a unio mystica of matter and spirit. And this pure abstracted Idealism is a tendency that has persistently plagued our judgment and enjoyment of the art object by emphasizing its didactic purpose over its aesthetic qualities. The tendency since Plato to judge art by how close a likeness it is to the Real and the True initiated a sort of moralistic instrumentalization of art for a single purpose (philosophical truth and goodness or social engineering in this direction), divesting art of its material pleasure potential. But art kept being beautiful and inexplicably moving no matter how many critics continued to judge it by how imitative it was. Materialism — as the means and end of utility — seems then to have something to do with this Platonic criterion… and seems to require a certain level of mimesis in order to be useful, recognizable, purpose-driven. And this is, to some extent, the thorny and important problem with which the de-materialists were grappling. But they missed the difference between materialism and materiality, and they let themselves be so demoralized by commodification and the reign of mimesis that they forgot that matter can be meaningful too. Materiality — as aesthetic, non-utilitarian, sensual — does not require mimesis (though it may avail itself of it) and can be a very good digression — when it comes in the form of devastating unexplainable beauty — from purpose, progress, social engineering, or utility; or a robust antidote to petty presumptuous moralizing and ideological dogma. It can remind us why we would even want to save the world in the first place. 

We have seen theorists and artists struggling for centuries to free themselves from the instrumentalization of their art and from Plato’s moral imperative to make art True and Good according to his a priori categories. By complaining in the 1890s about those who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing, Wilde was suggesting that there is a difference between materialism and materiality and that dandies could be spiritualists. In the 1930s and 40s we see artists relinquishing their freedom for political ideologies (on the left and right), at great cost to art — and, ultimately, society as well. In the 1960s, we see artists and theorists rebelling against object-hood and art as commodity in hopes of freeing themselves from corruption. But was their sacrifice worth it? And was it, after all, the right sacrifice? In Lippard’s “postface” to an updated version of her book, she noted that “conceptual art 3 years later turned out to be commodifiable after all.” Conceptual artists were not, she admitted, “freed from the tyranny of commodity status and market orientation”. “On the other hand,” she wrote, “the esthetic contributions of an ‘idea art’ have been considerable.” But, if the ideologically-driven purposes of conceptual de-materialization were not fulfilled by the relinquishment of beauty, why do we continue to ascribe to its “esthetic” — or more rightfully expressed: anti-aesthetic — contributions?

A hankering after a purely conceptual art smacks of what Nietzsche diagnosed as a sick tendency toward “otherworldliness” and condemned as a blasphemy against the flesh. It can be a beautiful fantasy, especially when one is suffering from physical pain, to leave the world behind and live, like Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, as nothing but a brain, or to be able to fly, or to be able to construct physically impossible architecture; but part of the “particular pleasure” — to use the phrase Aristotle coined to describe our response to tragedy — of these fantasies is that they are precisely not possible; they press up against the bounds of the real and create the most delightful and excruciating friction; the painted still life plays with the reality of time and mortality, and it really hurts us while we admire it. Love for another human being is all the more meaningful because he has a body that will age and die. What happens when we try to prudishly separate these lovers, Matter and Spirit? To attempt to artificially keep them apart is to strain toward a false ideal, a disembodied flight toward dystopia.

The problem of materiality has been with us always, and sages and philosophers have often tried to deride matter, whether in the form of bodies or of art objects, not only because it could not be controlled or, in the case of beauty, could not be defined or delimited by logic alone, but because Beauty is beyond the purview of their discipline. A book called After the End of Art by Arthur Danto makes this tendency terribly clear. Danto, although he often writes about art, is at bottom a philosopher, and he is deeply disturbed that, despite Plato’s very influential attempt to make art a matter of Truth and Goodness, art has been judged by chiefly aesthetic criteria from 1400 to Modernism (or from the post-primitive period to the Greeks and Romans, with a brief unexplained hiatus for the Middle Ages and then onward until the 1990s). Why is he disturbed by this?  What possible problem could an art critic have with an aesthetic evaluation of art? Could it be that the poor man doesn’t have a sensual aesthetic bone in his body?  Why, yes, of course, he feels left out! Poor philosophers!  Ideas and concepts are not enough for them, let us give them art too!  Let us let them make it philosophical. This was apparently Hegel’s idea too. Art would be lifted up from its purely aesthetic purposelessness to something more lofty (more masculine perhaps?), something disembodied and eternal: philosophy. Benjamin thought art would need to become politics; while Danto and Hegel prophesied that it would become philosophy. It amounts to the same thing, however, which is that art is to be divested of a large part of that which makes it art: sensation and its ability to communicate essential animalistic and sublime vision through a non-rational physical language of form.

Paradoxically though, de-materialized art often has more thematically to do with the so-called “real” world than a more traditionally aesthetic or object-based artistic practice, often engaging in political and social commentary and concerning itself with art’s use or social purpose, while object-based art has more often explored the other kind of “real” (sensation, aesthetic experience, emotion, spiritual experience). But by banishing the senses and sensibilities, extreme conceptual activity creates a dualistic isolation which may not be easily reversed: once we take ideas out of their grounding in real experience, we might be hard pressed to turn around and apply them or use them to change the reality which was their source (unless of course we believe, with Descartes, that thought and body are indeed distinct, in which case the outside world doesn’t matter at all!). When we take ideas too far away from the context of the real, we are like people walking on air who want to reform the state of the roads down below. With every aerial step, we lose touch with what it is like to walk on the surface of the world, and our solutions for ameliorating pot holes or bumps and icy surfaces become less and less relevant if not altogether misleading.  It may be nice while it lasts, but sooner or later we will fall and come crashing down into the reality of gravity; sooner or later we come smack up against the inevitabilities of the real. Idealism, in other words, though a necessary counter to dull acceptance of the status quo, must always come back down to earth to see, literally, how the new idea really feels. De-materialization, although it by necessity avails itself of real physical spaces and bodies, is born of — and stays as close as possible to — abstraction, intellectual activity. In “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” a 1967 Sol LeWitt essay Lippard includes in her book, we learn: “

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work… all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes art. What the work looks like isn’t too important. It has to look like something if it has a physical form. No matter what form it may finally have it must begin with an idea… 

Today, “social practices” take off where de-materialist conceptualism left off, but with the important distinction that social practice art seems to be more engaged in materiality, albeit the materiality of the real world rather than that of an art object removed from the real world. Both movements do have in common the impulse to break down the separation between art and life. (Social practices has taken this further, featuring such art projects as a map locating all the overhanging fruit available in an urban environment, or a communal project where the artists “grew colors” with plants), and it is easy to trace the idealistic impulse to make life into art back to those 6 years in the late 60s. Duchamp’s “readymades” were not idealistic in the same way, and aimed rather to knock down a culture of beauty, while the de-materialists may have had a more constructive desire: to increase something they called “art awareness” in the general public, which would encourage people, outside of a museum or gallery, to appreciate, notice, stop, and observe phenomena, relations, surprises, juxtapositions, which occur randomly in nature and civilization, and also, I suppose, to empower the general public — everyone is an artist! was the dubious rallying cry of the day — to participate in making art. And of course, you may well realize by now that I do believe that we all make the world together; but that does not mean that I think everything is art or that everyone is an artist, because I persist in believing that art is precisely something that is ritually and artificially removed from everyday reality. In other words, those of Oscar Wilde, “Art is art because it is not nature”. And in contrast to many of the artists featured in Lippard’s book, Yoko Ono, for one, knew this, and that is why she attempted to make events that were consciously differentiated from life experience. “All my events,” she said, in a lecture given at Wesleyan University in 1966, “are mostly wonderment… We never experience things separately… but if that is so, it is all the more reason and challenge to create a sensory experience isolated from the various sensory experiences, which is something rare in daily life”.

In contrast, another entry in Lippard’s book tells us that to exclude anything from the work of art is “fundamentally a formal or structural point of view” (which, in case you didn’t know, is a no-no). The de-materialist break depends upon “an acceptance or rejection of the multiplicity of non-art subject matter” and a resistance to “… the imposition of a closed instead of an open system”. In another entry on an exhibition entitled “Random Sample, N-42,” by Arnold Rockman from 1968, the artist (if one can even use that term in this context) describes his “methodology” as follows: “…no attempt has been made to arrive at an aesthetic arrangement. We’re interested in naturalism and natural history”. The reference to naturalism hearkens back to an earlier moralistic movement, Naturalism with a big “N,” which likewise downplayed aesthetic considerations in the interest of influencing social change, but which failed to attain the glorious inartistic flair of Mr. Rockman’s “work.” In a much more seductive example, Lippard mentions that Claes Oldenburg, when asked in 1967 to submit his proposal for an outdoor art show in the city, suggested simply “calling Manhattan a work of art”.  

Again, I am sympathetic to this impulse — and maybe it is because Oldenburg’s idea is celebratory, love-filled, because it is a hymn to the magic of the city, rather than a de-constructing blasé nihilistic kick in the beautiful complex face of human life. There is probably nothing more noble than an attempt to inspire people to pay more attention to the beauty of the everyday; but I am afraid that the results of this experiment have not been entirely positive. To the extent that the intention to break down the barrier between art and life has succeeded, art has consciously divested itself of its artistic (conscious, care-filled, devoted, worshipful, technically masterful, in a word: artful) qualities to become more like life, more random, less art-ificial, while it remains rather dubious as to whether or not life has become more artistic, or people more aware of its beauties, dynamics, ironies and messages. In truth, it seems more likely that the denigration of the art object (from high art to low brow) to everyday readymade random detritus has contributed to a pervasive care-lessness and dehumanization of society. What had been the benefit of art in the past for humanity (wonder, sacredness, imagination, harmony, aura, inspiration) — as uplift, divine inspiration, vision, an ideal toward which to strive, a lightning bolt of beauty to the heart, a reminder of one’s highest, best self and that of one’s fellows, of one’s true calling, is now suspect, and dragged down to the level of a studied carelessness. 

When we remove materiality from art and replace it with abstract ideas or with images that are merely signs and not symbols, we are bereft of the essential transubstantiation of a sensuous intellection. While signs, in Susanne Langer’s eloquent analysis, are information-bearing and important for utilitarian purposes, symbols are untranslatable, irreducible, and an incitement to dreaming and utopia. When we remove the art object from its place in a ritualistic context, conflating life and art and art and life, we divest art of its power to shift our consciousness from real to ideal and back again. We give up on the journey through the muck of matter, the challenges we would have faced had we gotten down in it and found out whether our ideas would work “on the ground,” as it were, and we skip blithely and obliviously to an unexamined conclusion. This is also, by the way, a danger of the convenience of technological virtuality and the false sense it gives us of having gotten somewhere or having learned something effortlessly, painlessly. It is as if we have given up the magic of materiality because of its association with commodity and commerce, its hardships and heaviness. Beauty we have given up because of an association with oppression, judgment, and aristocracy, and because it fades, alters, and eventually dies. Materiality is fearsome. It does present awesome challenges; it does create terrible problems; and it causes pain. And yet there is no escape from it but to not live at all. And, as art is an incitement to more, not less, aliveness, we must ask what art becomes when it dares not engage in contact with beautiful surfaces or even in passionate struggle with the material world? It becomes a polemical lifeless project which, at best, hurls tendentious notions (conceptual, abstract to the extreme, politics, social censure, shock and irony). But often enough, if truth be told, the alleged ideas transmitted by the residue of the conceptual practices are tenuous, vague, or possibly were never even fully developed in the first place. As Lippard alludes to in her “Postface,” most artists are not quite philosophers, after all. Whether this non-object art succeeds in redeeming the world where the object supposedly failed is doubtful. If, on the other hand, its intention is cynically anti-utopian, denying any impulse to improve the world, so much the worse.

Since we are all bodies and souls, we are deeply familiar, if we have ever stopped to consider it, with the confusion that ensues if we try to understand which part of us is mind and which body, or how it might even be possible that there is or is not a difference. Just in the way that fairy tales repeat archetypal mythologems over and over (the forgetful bridegroom motif helps us process faithlessness; the wise old witch helps us understand wisdom; the magical object helps us understand agency), the work of art, as long as it truly engages with physicality, comprehensively images forth our confusion about body and spirit, constantly rehearsing the union of opposites inherent in human life. This fruitful oscillation requires what the German Romantic Novalis called “the magic wand of analogy”. Without supplanting the actual, the specific, the concrete, or the real with some oblique shadow of itself (Dickinson’s “Tell the truth, but tell it slant”), without some illusion or leap of faith, we miss the metaphorical magic of art. Consider the puppet theater, which, whether it be miniature or larger than life, is emphatically a world of images and figures; see how the change in scale and change in material signals to us that it is a metaphor, an allegory, a moving image, and not reality? Even in regular theater one is often called upon to make props instead of using objects from the real world. This is a question of maintaining a consistent level of illusion, but also of transporting the audience from out of real life into some other temporary experiential zone. The pedestal, the proscenium, the separation of the stage and the audience, the margins around a poem, the silence between songs, all serve to create a ritual preparedness, a call to attendance and reverence. I know that Artaud and Brecht saw this transport as anti-revolutionary, as a soporific, and called for the constant interruption of the illusion of the work of art; but their critique of this illusion, though it proved that they believed art could be powerful enough to alter consciousness and lull to sleep or wake up to engagement, did not stop to look at all that was lost in the process of dis-enchantment. Plato too pays paradoxical homage to art’s powers by considering banishing it from his moralistically rational Republic; Benjamin also weighed the dangers and pleasures of the rapture of art, and likewise chose righteousness over ritual. But in the meantime, there has been little honest assessment of how much we have lost. 

Conceptual artists seem often to be a strange species of moralistic descendants of Plato’s critique of artists as liars and seducers from Truth. As Nietzsche noted, the arch-rationalism of Plato’s Socrates signaled the beginning of the end of Greece’s artistic glory. Contemporary conceptual artists follow this skeptical tendency by seeming to agree that art is suspect and merely a copy of a copy of the “really real.” For Plato, this meant that the artist copies the illusion of the physical world, which itself is just a bad and deluding copy of the real world of forms. While the Neo-Platonists redeemed art by insisting that the artist had a direct line to the divine (Blake’s “fourfold vision” in an earlier form), Plato’s definition of art as a bad copy of a copy and of the artist as an untrustworthy liar, has had a far-reaching deleterious effect. For conceptual de-materialists, this might take the form of an overscrupulous transparency about methods, materials, and intentions, or an avoidance of any association with seduction, love, or the “tricks” of beauty; a noble and brutal honesty. The artist’s hand is not hidden, but foregrounded. In fact, the art often disappears almost entirely behind the artist’s giant grubby hand. 

The Modernist perspective was about being critical, self-critical, critical of art itself. We can trace an evolution from what Schiller called the naïve and the sentimental approaches to art to what I characterize as the ironic — a bleak and heartless destructive force, without any of the regenerating energy of other artistic revolutions.  The naïve, a term Schiller used as praise, and which he applied to Homer’s objective descriptions, simply sees a tree and represents it. The sentimental, which was just as little a term of abuse as the naïve for Schiller, described the subjectivity of the Romantic artist, investing what he or she sees with self, emotions, spirit. The ironic, in contrast, is so caught up in criticism and self-analysis that it cannot even see the tree (let alone the forest) at all anymore. The Classicist (as naïve), thus saw the tree and nothing else. The Romantic or Modernist (as sentimental) saw the tree filtered through his own vision. The ironic Postmodernist — who arrogantly finds the Classicist and the Modernist to be equally unsophisticated and unaware — can’t even see the tree, but just sees himself. The Post-Postmodernist isn’t even allowed to do that. The author or artist is dead. Long live the critic! Representation becomes a subjectivist lie or a hopelessly naïve primitivism. To try to express something through imagistic material is seen by many today as a denial of radical subjectivity and a dangerous affirmation of the author’s or artist’s perspective over some other perspective; an appropriation, an imposition, an affront, an opinion; an assertion of insidiously constructed and probably oppressive ideas. The artist today is stuck in a corner where she may not affirm anything but her confusion, skepticism, neutralization, and her powerlessness without being labelled as reactionary.

Still, outside of all this theoretical prohibition of pleasure and beauty, there persists a timeless urge to make things with our hands that initiate ritualistic intermingling between reality and dreams, body and spirit, material and idea, human life and the search for meaning. It will not all be cancelled, as long as naïve and sentimental sensualists dare to love the colors, shapes, textures, and dynamics of physicality and learn to read within them the lineaments of their own eternally resonating presentiments of meaning. Material beauty will not be veiled, as long as we continue to be brave enough to sometimes reveal our own appetites, delights, and despairs without the cover of cleverness and ironic carelessness, as long as we dare to love this material-spiritual world — and the material-spiritual beings who inhabit it — in all of its flawed and broken majesty.  //

This essay was first published in the Fall 2016 issue of The Georgia Review. It is part of a collection called Portals: Reflections on the Spirit in Matter, runner-up for the 2020 Gournay Book Prize.