THE CONCEPTUAL ART FATHER

By Matthew Collings

Give us our daily meaning


Big questions
We take it for granted that conceptual art opens up a new world of meaning. From the early 1990s onward, for some reason conceptual art became the thing. The artworld became fascinated by conceptualism’s original 1960s/early-’70s moment. Plus everything that followed it. And by now we feel there's been a line from then to this moment, although in reality there's something odd about the line, because it starts with rebellion and ends with obedience. The artists used to be funny princes and princesses, spoiled brats throwing structured tantrums and calling it art, being excited about civil rights, wanting to end war, breaking down all sorts of boundaries but keeping one pretty much intact between hipsters and straights. That’s the core material: rebellious videos, abrasive happenings, and societal-breakdown encouragement. But then you get the new thing, which is that the original, inevitably fleeting nature of the event or happening, which was perhaps not really worth holding on to, is held on to like mad.

A large part of Hi, Mom! is devoted to a mock staging of a radical art happening, called "Be Black, Baby!" We see a lot of outrageous violence, including a near rape inflicted on an audience of white honkies by a performance group that appears to be part Living Theater, part Black Panthers. (The honkies, who’ve been forced to wear comic blackface makeup, love the experience.) The movie is silly but also real seeming in that it genuinely captures the emotional texture of the hot art scene of those times, Conceptual art’s mixture of the solemn and the ridiculous, the deeply felt but also the deeply felt for rather a short time (and the utterly engaged politically but only as a prelude to utter egotistical self-indulgence).

Revere ropey stuff
What defines Conceptual art (and its fallout movements and lead-up ones) is concentration on meaning. Even historic Minimalism, which doesn’t have any obvious meanings, is believed to have them anyway. Who cares what they are. Something to do with perception, the body, behavior, etc., etc. — subjects that sound like someone somewhere wrote something about them at some time. So the minimal look now has a meaning just by looking like Minimalism. In Conceptual art’s case, the meanings are always there, but it’s never clear why they should be taken seriously or thought about at all after 30 seconds.

And Smithson’s Spiral Jetty: we can never hear the end of it, this throwaway event (interesting raw content, banal ultimate form) done for a lark, for the moment, not for the ages, a joke on primitive totemic intensity, which we now have to worship like a pharaoh entombed in a pyramid.

Mad stuff
I watched a DVD of Hi, Mom! the other day while staying at a friend’s house in San Francisco. That morning, I’d been to the SF MoMA and seen two shows, each devoted to conceptual art: one hard-core, the other a selection of new acquisitions, which (because of universal acquisition patterns) tended to be conceptual art oriented. The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now featured anything artistic that the public had to get literally involved in: it might be Valie Export’s 1968 Tap and Touch Cinema event (out on the street, men feel her breasts through a strap-on box; the resulting video has subtitles of Theory talk), or it might be some living artworks by Erwin Wurm (San Franciscans get on a white plinth for a minute and balance some oranges and brooms, and it’s a sculpture). The acquisitions exhibition, Passageworks, would have passed quickly out of my mind if it weren’t for the inclusion of an installation from 2000 by French artist Pierre Huyghe.

There were also news photos of Wojtowicz’s real male wife, looking strikingly pretty, like his impersonator in the movie, Chris Sarandon (first husband of Susan), and Wojtowicz’s female wife, looking pretty fat, like the fat actress who played her (if you haven’t seen the film, one of the twists in it is that the hero has two wives: one male, from those days’ version of a civil ceremony, and one female). We are also treated to the whole of an episode of a 1978 Jeanne Parr TV show, where Parr interviews Wojtowicz in prison. He is chubby and plain, in sharp contrast to his haunted good looks a few years previously. (He tells Parr: "If you’re a man, you take responsibility for your actions.") Parr also interviews Wojtowicz’s male wife, who’s now become a woman and makes a living as a prostitute. (Q: "Do they know you used to be a man?" A: "No!")