A Hallmark of Conceptual Art Is Letting the Idea Come Before the Physical Onject

This article considers whether Kant's aesthetics withstands the challenge of conceptual art. I take conceptual art rather than some other, more contempo, form of gimmicky art equally my focus because conceptual art is widely taken to be explicitly motivated by hostility towards artful approaches to art. If this is true – and it may not be – one should expect it to offer the stiffest challenge to aesthetic theories of fine art, Kant'due south included. Earlier moving on to the noun issue, it will help to clarify how I sympathize 'conceptual art', a category that tends to be employed rather loosely by philosophers – including some working direct on the domain.

1. Competing conceptions of conceptual art

Conceptual art can be defined widely or narrowly, both temporally and geographically, depending on whether or non one includes whatever of its precursor forms or more obvious legacies, and its canonical Western variants or the parallel not-Western developments that only became widely known slightly later. In terms of this broader perspective, I shall adopt a relatively restrictive definition here, certainly past comparison to how the term is typically used in philosophy. But in terms of debates internal to conceptual art, which is a highly contested field – particularly as to who did what, when, where and whether doing so constitutes conceptual art 'proper' – I will adopt a relatively permissive definition, and then as to avert reducing conceptual art to the preferred variant of any of its more than outspoken exponents. Conceptual artists were involved in a struggle for disquisitional recognition and fine art-world patronage, and their claims demand to be read accordingly. This is true of artists' claims more by and large, but it is especially true of conceptual artists' claims, given the nature of this fine art.Footnote ^one For present purposes I shall subclass these oftentimes fractious internal debates and focus on more recent accounts by philosophers, such as Peter Osborne and the co-authored work of Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens.Footnote ⁱⁱ

Osborne is probably the virtually art-historically informed philosopher working on conceptual art. Peradventure unsurprisingly, given his underlying Adornian orientation, Osborne presents conceptual art as the production of a series of 'negations' – of the fabric object, the creative medium, (good) visual grade and established modes of artistic autonomy. Taken together these ideas tend to underpin aesthetic conceptions of art, particularly in more recent modernist incarnations. For this reason, Osborne understands conceptual art every bit not so much another form of art, on a par with any other such form, as an try to transform the very nature of art, as understood by aesthetic theory – a fortiori modernist aesthetics – birthday. (Osborne Reference Osborne2002: eighteen)

Similar art-historical commentators, Osborne divides conceptual art into a number of subgenres. Rather than run through his entire taxonomy here, a few words almost the artists he gathers nether the headings 'Process, Organization and Series' and 'Word and Sign' – which include LeWitt and Kosuth respectively – volition be sufficient. Osborne presents the old, process-based and systems-oriented, kind of conceptual art as a hybrid genre that tracks the emergence of conceptual art from the minimalist interest in seriality, serial and systems. It includes artists, such equally Bochner and LeWitt, who Osborne takes to be pushing Donald Judd'due south minimalist reduction of art to objecthood to the very cusp of art as idea, without ever quite settling on the presentation of ideas themselves every bit sufficient. Though ideas alone were sufficient co-ordinate to LeWitt'southward 'Sentences on Conceptual Fine art', the piece of work of neither left behind visual presentation birthday, and the extent to which LeWitt equivocates, particularly in 'Paragraphs on Conceptual Art' as to whether conceptual artists are only interested in conception, or both conception and execution, is notable (LeWitt Reference LeWitt, Alexander and Blake2000)

Under his latter heading, Osborne includes artists, such as Barry, Weiner and Kosuth, who in diverse, often conflicting, ways used linguistic communication to supplant or eclipse art's visuality. Equally Osborne notes, the differences between these artists, frequently lumped together simply in virtue of their mutual participation in some of the more influential early Seth Siegelaub shows, could exist amend marked than they are. Among them, only Kosuth claimed to be exclusively focused on the concept of fine art, in such a fashion that only his own practice deserved to be called conceptual art 'proper'. This is the standard pose of what Osborne calls 'potent' or 'sectional' conceptual art, which also includes the early work of Art & Linguistic communication. Past contrast, Weiner maintained an virtually sculptural involvement in the empirical investigation of materials and actions, and understood his own 'Statements' in this light. Barry is besides still involved, albeit in an attenuated sense, with matter: inert gases are matter in indeterminate grade and sound waves remain measurable – dissimilar thoughts – if non material. Then, where Kosuth took himself to be interrogating the concept of art in a manner inspired past the philosophy of language, Barry used language to pick out works made of invisible matter or forms of energy, and Weiner used meaty linguistic 'statements' to draw the empirical investigation of concrete materials and actions. Each makes utilise of language, albeit in very dissimilar ways.

But what I want to retain from Osborne's partition of the field is its underlying non-normative stardom between the 'weak' or 'inclusive' view of conceptual art held by LeWitt and many others, and the 'potent' or 'exclusive' notion of conceptual art preferred by Kosuth and Art & Language in item.Footnote ³ Only the latter, more restrictive variant consisted solely of the self-reflexive investigation of art'due south concept or definition. This is what Kosuth called 'pure' or 'theoretical' conceptual art, and liked to counterpose pejoratively to 'stylistic' conceptual art: that is, art that has the wait of conceptual art, but is compromised by its residual morphological or stylistic commitments.

Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens's co-authored piece of work, which is the about aggressive endeavor to frame a full general definition of conceptual art from inside the analytic tradition, takes a very unlike line.Footnote ⁴ Cardinal to their approach is a distinction between an creative medium and a (mere) means. In conceptual fine art, the traditional medium, which would typically exist a physical object or set of worked materials, is reduced to a mere means, and ideas become the medium proper. The onetime may be what enables u.s. to choice out the latter, just it is no longer the work'due south medium – there is no physical medium in conceptual art. For this reason, whatsoever object, materials or result allow us access to the ideas that serve equally the work's medium, they cannot be the proper focus of beholden judgement. Viewed from this perspective, the title and photograph documenting a work in Barry's Inert Gas series – in which Barry releases a specific amount of inert gas into the atmosphere – plant mere ways for making these works available, rather than these works' media. Were they its media, it would matter how they are realized, and information technology does not.Footnote ⁵ The medium here is an idea, the photographs and title are the ways by which the artist grants us access to that thought.

Goldie and Schellekens take this to be true of all conceptual art. But if this were right, bona-fide conceptual fine art would reduce to a remarkably small subset of what is standardly treated as such, and first order artistic, critical, curatorial exercise would exist hopelessly confused. Indeed, it is merely strictly truthful of 'strong' conceptual art, its most puritanical form. As such, information technology is actually something of a minority position within the larger field. Goldie and Schellekens come close to granting this themselves, when they admit that perhaps not all works of conceptual art are fully disembodied or 'dematerialized' later on all. Left hanging like this, however, such an access risks rendering their account stipulative.

Because they understand conceptual art as a whole to entail the irrelevance of material apotheosis to artistic value, Goldie and Schellekens are committed to an even stronger perception of the 'ontological challenge' that conceptual art presents for traditional conceptions of fine art than Osborne. What Osborne presents privatively, as a negation of traditional forms, Goldie and Schellekens present positively, as 'the idea idea', just the issue is much the same substantively (Osborne Reference Osborne2002: 18–xix; Goldie and Schellekens Reference Goldie and Schellekens2007: 55–60). If the idea is at present the work, to appreciate the work is to appreciate the idea the piece of work puts forwards. The question then becomes: in what ways may ideas be appreciated? Hither Goldie and Schellekens make a motility than runs directly counter to Osborne: they apply the challenge that conceptual art presents to traditional conceptions of art to motivate a form of 'aesthetic idealism' that seeks to compensate conceptual art for aesthetic theory.Footnote ⁶ If ideas tin can have aesthetic qualities, and there seems no expert reason to deny this – ideas can strike us as elegant or incisive, clumsy or ugly – then conceptual art need non be construed as inimical to aesthetic response per se; it need merely be construed as hostile to aesthetic response every bit this is now standardly conceived: that is, equally a sensuous or felt response to perceptual form.Footnote ⁷ This, of class, is precisely the conception of aesthetic response standardly attributed to Kant'due south aesthetics as a species of formalism in the philosophy of fine art. The question for us is whether there is anything in Kant's aesthetics that precludes ideas existence appreciated in ways that appreciating works of conceptual art aesthetically would seem to require. To demonstrate the applicability of Kant'southward aesthetics to works of this kind, we need to prove that it is possible for us to engage in indeterminate, imaginatively stimulating, ways with the ideas that works of conceptual fine art present.

My own view, while it has more in mutual with the inclusivity of Osborne's account than with the exclusivity of Goldie and Schellekens's, is distinct from both: conceptual art is one course of non-perceptual art. 'Non-perceptual fine art' (NPA), as I conceive information technology, encompasses both works presented in context of visual art, the perceptible properties of which are entirely irrelevant to their appreciation as art, and works presented in the context of visual fine art that are non reducible to the sensible properties of what picks them out. In event, there is a strong and a weak formulation of NPA: strong non-perceptual art (SNPA) denotes works that have no sensible backdrop, so proper appreciation of such works cannot involve appreciation of the sensible object or result that picks them out; weak non-perceptual art (WNPA), past dissimilarity, denotes works that practice possess sensible properties, but which are not exhausted by those properties; and then proper appreciation cannot only involve appreciation of such properties. The stiffest challenge to Kant's aesthetics is presented by SNPA rather than WNPA; but because SNPA distinguishes, but does not exhaust, conceptual art, the more permissive conception of conceptual art proposed by Osborne – co-ordinate to which SNPA would be one subgenre of a more varied general form – is to be preferred.Footnote ^viii

But if perceptible properties are not the source of SNPA's value equally fine art, what is? The obvious candidate would be the works' semantic properties. If our relation to such properties can be understood aesthetically, then it should in principle be possible to capeesh SNPA aesthetically. But can we practice and so in ways that Kant's conception of art and aesthetic sentence, more specifically, would encompass? Doing so requires showing that conceptual art supports the kind of imaginative engagement with ideas that promote what Kant calls a 'feeling of life' (Lebensgefühl), a pleasance taken in the enhancement of the subject'due south ain cognitive powers. Demonstrating the applicability of Kant's aesthetics to conceptual art requires making expert on this claim.

two. Conceptual complexity in Kant's aesthetics

Before that tin can be done, even so, common assumptions about the narrow scope of Kant's aesthetics need to be defused. I brainstorm by drawing attention to ii forms of conceptual complexity that – at least arguably – pertain to the aesthetic appreciation of fine art by definition co-ordinate to the tertiary Critique: the concept of 'the end' determining what the thing in question is supposed to be (Kant's account of dependent dazzler, CPJ §16); and the thematic content or idea that the piece of work in question is supposed to express (Kant's theory of artful ideas, CPJ §49). By cartoon attending to both, my aim is to show that Kant's aesthetics is non conceptually constrained past whatsoever contingent historical features of the art of his ain day, and can in principle therefore accommodate forms of art that Kant himself would have had no reason to anticipate, let alone consider.

3. Dependent beauty

The well-nigh basic claim of the Analytic of the Beautiful is that judgements of taste are non-subsumptive: they do not subsume an object, event or manifold under a concept in virtue of it exhibiting the relevant traits. Instead, artful judgements adjure to the feeling to which a given object, consequence or manifold gives rise in the judge. Simply if that is right, the question arises as to how a kind of judgement that does count a concept among its determining grounds – judgements that 'presuppose a concept of the end that determines what the thing should exist, hence a concept of its perfection' – could still count as aesthetic according to Kant'south own theory (CPJ, 5: 230).Footnote ⁹ To run into this, distinguish ii means of judging the same object: the botanist may judge the dazzler of a flower freely, abstracting from everything she knows near the part of flowers in attracting bees and thereby securing pollination, or she may judge it dependently, taking account of its part in her judgement of its beauty. In the former case she focuses exclusively on the beauty of the visual array that meets the heart, in the latter instance on the fittingness of such an array to a thing with this role. I suggest information technology is the latter form of judgement that should – at least standardly – use to works of art on Kant'due south account.Footnote ^x

Kant's claim, in §16, that not all works of art are dependently cute presents an obvious problem for this interpretation. Kant'south examples – 'designs à la grecque', 'foliage for borders or on wallpaper' and 'musical fantasias (without a theme)' (CPJ, five: 229) – propose that Kant regards non-representational and decorative art as freely beautiful. Kant's thought seems to be that, because such forms of art do not correspond anything, nosotros need not guess them in relation to a concept of some end, or associated notion of perfection in the fulfilment of that end, that might otherwise be suggested. Certainly, this is how Kant has been read by a number of influential twentieth-century formalists in fine art criticism and theory.Footnote ¹¹ This view is put nether pressure, withal, when Kant grants (in §45) that in society to judge artistic dazzler as creative dazzler we must be aware that it is art that we judge:

In a production of art one must be enlightened that it is art, and non nature; yet the purposiveness in its form must all the same seem to exist every bit complimentary from all constraint past capricious rules as if were a product of nature. … art can simply be called beautiful if nosotros are aware that it is art and all the same it looks to us like nature. (CPJ, 5: 306, my emphasis)

That is, despite the fact that nosotros must know that information technology is art rather than nature that we judge, it must nonetheless seem as free from the constraint of concepts or rules that might otherwise impede its complimentary appreciation as mere nature. In granting this, Kant acknowledges that we must at least bring the concept of fine art to be bear on anything judged accordingly, and this could take a broad multifariousness of implications, depending on how we understand the concept of fine art itself. By treating not-representational fine art as if it were exception to this requirement, formalists try to judge it as though it were free beauty in Kant's sense. Simply this cannot be correct. Consider the differences betwixt a perceptual manifold formed naturally and a similar, even indiscernible, manifold created as art. Just the latter is what Kant would call a 'production through liberty' (§43): something that, equally a product of intentional agency, must be judged in the calorie-free of the reasons for which it was made, if it is to exist judged accordingly. Abstract and decorative art are no exception: to guess any kind of art freely is to treat it as though information technology were a product of natural causation, rather than an accomplishment of artistic bureau:

If the object is given equally a product of art, and is every bit such to be declared cute, and so, since fine art always presupposes an end in the cause (and its causality), a concept must first be the basis of what the thing is supposed to be, and since the agreement of the manifold in a thing with its inner determination as an cease is the perfection of the thing, in judging of the beauty of art the perfection of the affair will also have to exist taken into account. (CPJ, five: 311, my emphasis)

Putting all this together, the implications of Kant'due south overall position would seem to be: and so long equally we aspire to judge fine art as art, not but must nosotros be enlightened that it is art nosotros are judging; equally a production of rational bureau, we must accept the reasons for which it was made into business relationship. Every bit Kant puts it: 'only production through freedom, i.e. through a capacity for option that grounds its actions in reason, should be chosen art' (CPJ, five: 303). The former is a ground-level commitment pertaining to any sentence of art as such; the latter, while also generalizing across all judgements of art, enables Kant'southward theory to arrange the different degrees of thematic complication that different artworks – abstract art included – may involve.Footnote ¹² The upshot is that, while nosotros are in principle free to approximate abstract (or any other kind of) art non-dependently, as pure visual array, we cannot judge its beauty equally creative beauty freely, even for Kant. The significance of dependent dazzler is in this manner to make a given (historically and culturally variable) understanding of art internal to any judgement of artistic beauty on Kant'south account.

four. Artful ideas

Nosotros have seen that judging something beautiful as a 'production through freedom' implicates questions of rational agency to which such judgement must remain responsive. What was the artist trying to accomplish? What is the resulting piece of work nearly? What does it express? Keeping such questions in mind requires judging the work in lite of a far more varied ready of concepts than simply that of art itself. Characterizing works of art every bit indirect presentations of 'artful ideas' is Kant's way of addressing such questions, and thereby accounting for fine art's semantic content:

By an aesthetic idea … I mean that representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking though without information technology being possible for any determinate idea, i.east. concept, to be adequate to it … One readily sees that it is the counterpart (pendant) of an thought of reason, which is, conversely, a concept to which no intuition (representation of the imagination) can be adequate. (CPJ, 5: 314)

Unlike concepts, what ideas choice out have no empirical conditions of application, and then cannot found 18-carat objects of knowledge for finite rational beings. Despite this, they retain an action-guiding, regulative function: merely aspiring to act morally, for instance, requires that nosotros act under the idea of freedom – irrespective of whether we are in fact free, or can know that nosotros are. Simply if ideas have no empirical atmospheric condition of application, how could they be given sensible embodiment in fine art? Kant'due south account of aesthetic ideas is meant to explain this, by clarifying what is distinctive both about (i) the content of works of fine art and (ii) how works of art are obliged to embody or express such content as a result. Kant's conception of the former is disjunctive: either works of art nowadays ideas the objects of which tin can be encountered in experience (love, envy, death, fortitude), simply do and so with a fullness that feel itself rarely affords; or they present super-sensible ideas (immortality, God, liberty, the soul) the objects of which cannot, in principle, be encountered in experience. In effect, Kant offers a weaker (or more than inclusive) and a stronger (or more than exclusive) formulation of what works of art limited, and that he does is only equally well: given that most works of art exercise not in fact present ideas in the stronger, more than sectional sense, it would render Kant'due south theory indefensibly stipulative were he to insist on the stronger conception for all works of art.Footnote ¹³

Then much for what is distinctive about the content of works of art, co-ordinate to Kant: how are works of art able to limited such content? Given that Kant takes ideas to be distinguished from concepts by the fact that they cannot adequately be presented to intuition, works of art must of necessity nowadays such ideas indirectly. To explain how this is possible, Kant distinguishes between the 'logical' and 'aesthetic' attributes of an thought: an idea's logical attributes would be those traits in virtue of the fulfilment of which the idea in question is applicable; an thought's aesthetic attributes, by contrast, would be an indirect or figurative presentation of those aforementioned attributes by means of 'supplementary representations of the imagination' that 'express just the implications connected with [an idea] and its analogousness with others' (CPJ, 5: 315). This makes Kant's thought sound much more obscure than information technology is. Take Kant's own instance: 'Jupiter's eagle with the lightning in its claws' presents the idea of God'south majesty figuratively, by means of an image (CPJ, 5: 315). In the example of 'God's majesty', the thought'south logical attributes would be omniscience, omnipotence and so on. While such attributes cannot exist exhaustively presented in intuition by finite rational beings, the image of Jupiter'southward hawkeye tin can, and when one reflects on the presentation of a being powerful and otherworldly enough to grip a bolt of lightning in its talons, one is on the manner to imagining the awe-inspiring nature of God's majesty. In sum, aesthetic ideas plant a kind of metaphor, visual or otherwise. Hither: see God's majesty in the light of the wealth of thoughts provoked past Jupiter'south eagle.

The indirection necessitated by presenting rational ideas in sensible form has an additional benefit on Kant's account: because it prompts imagination to spread over the rich seam of images, thoughts and associations triggered by a given presentation, the indirect presentation of ideas 'aesthetically expands' (ästhetisch erweitet) the ideas thereby presented. As a upshot, works of art 'animate' or 'enliven' (beleben) the mind, freeing imagination from the subservient part of merely schematizing concepts of understanding, by allowing information technology to roam widely over an assortment of related concepts and presentations that provide more material for reflection, and in so doing provoke more thought, than a direct presentation could afford. In sum:

[aesthetic attributes] requite the imagination crusade to spread itself over a multitude of related presentations, which allow i recall more than one tin express in a concept determined past words; they yield (geben) an aesthetic idea, which serves that thought of reason instead of logical presentation, although really only to animate the mind past opening upwardly for it the prospect of an immeasurable field of related presentations. (CPJ, five: 315)

v. Conceptual art and aesthetic ideas: a case report

The question is whether this understanding of works of art as indirect – typically metaphorical – presentations of ideas that cannot be fully presented in intuition accommodates conceptual art.Footnote ^fourteen Think the competing conceptions of conceptual fine art discussed in department 1. The view I proposed at that place, according to which SNPA distinguishes but does not exhaust conceptual art, generates a four-fold taxonomy: (i) WNPA that is non in fact conceptual art, such as Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917) or Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning (1953), although it is widely treated as such by analytic philosophers of art; (2) WNPA that is conceptual art, such every bit Lawrence Weiner'south A 36" x 36" REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALLBOARD FROM A WALL (1968) or Art & Language's Index 01 (1972); (three) SNPA that is conceptual art, such equally Weiner'southward THE Chill Circle SHATTERED (1969) or Robert Barry'southward All the things I know just which I am non at the moment thinking – 1:36pm; June 5, 1969 (1969); and (iv) SNPA that is not conceptual fine art, which I take to include many (non-avant-garde) works of literature, and all works of literature in translation. Whether the latter also includes works of fine art is an interesting question; the answer will be no if only conceptual art tin can be SNPA, only not if there is SNPA that is non conceptual art. I wish to remain neutral on this question here.

I have dedicated this taxonomy elsewhere.Footnote ^fifteen For present purposes I focus on the works by Lawrence Weiner, the improve to bring out some differences between WNPA and SNPA, and to demonstrate that Kant's theory of fine art can accommodate both.Footnote ¹⁶ Some context will be helpful. Weiner started out as a painter, and the paintings of relevance to the first of the two works I desire to talk over are the Removal Paintings from the mid to late 1960s. These are reductive, hard-edged abstractions, typically comprising several bands of spray-painted colour merely occasionally monochrome, with one or more than rectangular notches removed from their corners to generate irregularly shaped canvases. Not only the colours used and the intensity of those colours, but also the size of both the paintings and the removals from them, were adamant by the works' recipients. These paintings, which Weiner discontinued in leap 1968, precede A 36" ten 36" REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALLBOARD FROM A WALL (1968). Calling the latter a work of weak rather than strong NPA may seem odd, in view of the famous 'Statement of Intent' (1969) that oriented Weiner's production once he gave upward painting in 1968. Central to this statement was the thought that a piece of work may, simply need not be physically realized, reflecting Weiner'south belief that the work exists as soon every bit the words that pick it out are fabricated public:

1. one. The creative person may construct the work

2. 2. The work may be fabricated

3. three. The piece of work need non be built

Each beingness equal and consistent with the intent of the artist, the decision as to status rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership. (Weiner Reference Weiner1969: northward.p.)

The inspiration for this argument, according to Weiner, was what happened to an of import transitional work that he exhibited in Siegelaub's group testify Hay, Mesh, String at Windham College, Vermont (May 1968). Staples, Stakes, Twine and Turf, equally it was originally titled, comprised a thirty × 21m grid marked out past xxx-four wooden stakes strung together with twine, with a smaller rectangle removed from i corner of the larger rectangle, much like the 'Removal Paintings'. It was installed on a lawn between two student dorms, and soon vandalized by students wishing to reclaim the space for touch football game. On seeing the consequence Weiner concluded that it did non matter, since the piece of work itself remained undamaged. When republished in Weiner's book Statements (1968) the piece of work became 'A series of stakes prepare in the ground at regular intervals to form a rectangle with twine strung from stake to stake to bind a grid – a rectangle removed from this rectangle' (1968), a formulation consistent with, just not exhausted by, its original incarnation (Weiner Reference Weiner1968: due north.p.). In its reconfigured course, in common with all Weiner's works released every bit 'Statements', the piece of work exists irrespective of whether or not it is congenital. Prima facie, this looks like as good an illustration of Goldie and Schellekens' 'idea idea,' as one might promise for: if the piece of work can exist independently of being congenital, and so no physical properties of any particular installation can be essential to its nature. As Weiner subsequently clarified: 'there is no correct way to construct the piece as there is no incorrect manner to construct it. If the piece is built information technology constitutes not how the piece looks but only how information technology could look' (Weiner, in Lippard Reference Lippard1997: 74). But one must exist attentive to the differences between individual works when considering Weiner's corpus in calorie-free of this full general statement, equally 36" 10 36" Foursquare REMOVAL (Figure one) makes articulate.

According to the bones logic of Weiner'south post-painting corpus, a work like this exists as soon every bit the words that pick it out are made public, irrespective of whether it is ever really built. Conversely, the work may exist built (or, perhaps amend, installed) innumerable times on a diverseness of dissimilar, merely compliant, surfaces and remain the same work. But distinguish the question of the work'south identity which, co-ordinate to the parameters established by Weiner'due south mature exercise does not require instantiation, from the question of what is required to appreciate such a work. Could one possess a total, or fifty-fifty adequate, appreciation of A 36" x 36" SQUARE REMOVAL without seeing it installed? I think not: much similar Sol LeWitt's education-based work, 1 learns a bang-up deal from seeing such a work installed. Indeed, non only can i not have an acceptable appreciation of the work without seeing it installed, one will gain a much richer appreciation from seeing it installed on a diversity of surfaces. So what do nosotros learn from seeing this work installed?

Figure one.Lawrence Weiner, A 36" x 36" REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALLBOARD FROM A WALL, 1968, Works & Reconstructions, Kunsthalle, Berne, Switzerland, 1983. © 2021 Lawrence Weiner / DACS, London.

In the iconic photographs of its early installations (in the McLendon Building, NYC, for Siegelaub's January v-31, 1969 (1969) or Kunsthalle, Berne for Harald Szeeman's Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form: Works – Concepts – Processes – Situations – Information (March–April 1969)) one sees the absence or refusal of painting itself. This is the moment in Weiner's oeuvre at which the removal of painting equally such and in its entirety, and not merely a part thereof (a removal from an private painting) is enacted. Once the top layer of plaster, wallboard or similar is removed to reveal the rougher, ungraded surface of the wall below, ane sees an afterwards-paradigm or negative of the 'last painting', the painting to cease all painting, that the oeuvre of so many first-generation conceptual artists either enacts or implies prior to leaving painting behind altogether.Footnote ¹⁷ Even the uneven edge created by removing the plaster calls to mind, in negative form, the facture that roughens the edges of a thickly worked painting. What i sees, in consequence, is the absence of the painting that Weiner has refused to pigment.

Only if the piece of work'due south significance as a kind of pittura negativa remains hidden until ane sees it installed, the properties of its material instantiation cannot be mere means; if they significantly shape our agreement of the idea the piece of work embodies – that of the finish of painting – they must be internal to the work itself, which can therefore only be weakly, rather than strongly, not-perceptual. As Weiner's notebooks from the fourth dimension make clear, the work comprises both 'language + the materials referred to', and non merely the former. What I have just drawn attention to in interpreting this piece of work are, in Kant's terms, the 'aesthetic attributes' through which A 36" ten 36" Square REMOVAL indirectly communicates the idea of the finish of painting. This is something that could only ever exist an idea, given that it could not be exhaustively presented to intuition by, say, Weiner merely giving up painting. It is a mark of Weiner's 'genius' – not in the everyday sense, but in Kant'south sense – to have striking upon an indirect means of presenting what cannot exist directly presented despite this:

Genius … consists in the happy relation which no scientific discipline can teach and no diligence acquire, of finding ideas for a given concept on the 1 mitt and on the other striking upon the expression for these, through which the subjective disposition of the mind that is thereby produced, equally an accompaniment of a concept, tin be communicated to others. … to express what is unnameable in the mental state in the case of a sure representation and to make it universally communicable … requires a kinesthesia for apprehending the apace passing play of the imagination and unifying it into a concept … which can exist communicated without the constraint of rules. (CPJ, v: 317)

Kant's conception here may be tortuous, but his idea is straightforward. Recollect the remarks from §49 cited before, to the effect that a work's artful attributes 'yield' (geben) an artful idea, the proper function of which is to 'animate' (beleben) the mind of their recipient. Genius is now said to consist in the ability not merely 'to find ideas for a given concept' but, more particularly, to 'striking upon ways of expressing these ideas' capable of 'communicating to others' the 'subjective disposition of mind' that accompanies them. These remarks testify Kant'due south theory of artistic creation to be a species of expressionism: the liberation of the recipient's imagination from its standard function of schematizing concepts of the agreement – the hallmark of aesthetic cogitating judgement more generally – is accomplished through the genius'southward ability to 'auscultate the rapidly passing play of the imagination and unify it into a concept … which can be communicated without the constraint of rules'.Footnote ^eighteen So conceived, genius picks out the chapters to render the specific attunement of imagination and understanding occasioned by a particular idea communicable, by embodying its play in the unified organization of aesthetic attributes used to indirectly communicate the piece of work's theme. What Kirk Pillow has called the 'fulfilled aesthetic idea' would be the feeling of cognitive enhancement that such embodiment triggers in the work's appreciator by their appreciation of the work (Pillow Reference Pillow2001: 200ff.).

My second example should help to brand this clear. Different A 36" x 36" Square REMOVAL, THE Arctic Circumvolve SHATTERED is a work of stiff NPA (Figures 2 and 3). And so what makes the difference? Hither I depart from Weiner. Weiner believes not simply that this work can exist instantiated, merely that he has in fact instantiated it. I believe he is mistaken nearly this: Weiner, I suggest, misconstrues the implications of his own piece of work in this case. In 'Art within the Arctic Circle' Lucy Lippard includes some very underwhelming photographs of Weiner purporting to instantiate this work; the photographs and text document Weiner scoring the surface of a stone by shooting it with .22 rifle.Footnote ^nineteen What Weiner has thereby instantiated is a work that might have been chosen A Burglarize DISCHARGED IN AN OPEN SPACE or A ROCK FIRED UPON, or some such; what he has not thereby instantiated is a work titled THE ARCTIC Circumvolve SHATTERED.

Effigy 2. Lawrence Weiner, THE ARCTIC CIRCLE SHATTERED, 1969, sponsored by the Edmonton Fine art Gallery, Alberta, Canada, for the exhibition Place and Procedure – Chill Trip, 1969. © 2021 Lawrence Weiner / DACS, London. Photo: Lucy Lippard.

Figure three. Lawrence Weiner, THE Arctic Circle SHATTERED, 1969, sponsored by the Edmonton Art Gallery, Alberta, Canada, for the exhibition Place and Process – Arctic Trip, 1969. © 2021 Lawrence Weiner / DACS, London. Photograph: Lucy Lippard.

Why not? 'The Arctic Circle' is a cartographic abstraction. It denotes the virtual line generated by joining a serial of points on the Earth's surface; this line picks out the southern-most limit of the Arctic region (approximately 66 degrees 33 minutes n of the Equator), which fluctuates slightly in line with the Globe's axial tilt relative to the sun, above which the sun viewed from ocean level does not assault the summer solstice or rise on the winter solstice. Every bit an abstraction, the Arctic Circle cannot be shattered: abstractions can be undermined, shown to be incoherent or reductive, to misrepresent reality, to have unwanted implications and the like. Merely they cannot be 'shattered', if this is taken to mean broken into many smaller pieces in the style that physical objects can. Every bit I understand information technology, a work that invites us to entertain the prospect of an abstraction 'shattered' could non exist instantiated.

By inviting us to imagine a cartographic abstraction shattered as if it were physically embodied, the work invites us to entertain a category mistake of sorts; the Earth'due south surface may be shattered in function or in whole – Weiner's earliest works involved detonating explosives in the desert scrub – but an abstraction cannot be. Qua abstraction, it is not in the course of material entities that could exist and so shattered, unlike Weiner'southward underwhelming rock. But just what is it that we are being asked to imagine, in entertaining a category mistake of this sort? It is impossible to say definitively or exhaustively, and that information technology is is to the point. Is it an cease to mapping and, assuming mapping to be a distinctly deed, an end to the imposition of human order on the Earth? If and so, this might entail imagining either the idea of an end to humanity, or of humanity's inhabitation of the Globe. Or is it – to prefer a more planetary perspective – the end of our solar system itself and, so also, the Arctic Circle every bit an index of the Earth'south relation to its lord's day, with the gradual decay of our Sun? These are non ideas that could exist presented to intuition in sensible grade. Or considered more than concretely, in low-cal of contemporary sensation of the climate catastrophe, are we being asked to imagine the ramifying effects of global warming: melting polar water ice caps and ascension sea levels; the release of greenhouse gases currently trapped in the Chill permafrost; the slowing of the Gulf Stream? While these interpretations, existence in competition, cannot at all be both definitive and correct, engaging with the piece of work aesthetically explicitly does not require us to choose between them. Indeed, prompting imagination to range over such a rich and, in principle, inexhaustible seam of associations and possible interpretations is just what one would expect any successful work to do, on Kant's account of works of art as expressions of artful ideas: that is, 'representation[s] of the imagination associated with a given concept, which [are] combined with such a manifold of fractional representations in the gratuitous use of the imagination that no expression designating a determinate concept can exist constitute for [them]' (CPJ, 5: 316). Conceptual art is no exception.

vi. The question reconsidered

I have focused here on making a positive case for the applicability of Kant'south account of aesthetic ideas to the kinds of conceptual art typically regarded as the stiffest claiming to artful theories of fine art. In doing so I take set bated a number of worries: whether Kant is committed, theoretically, to a representational theory of art (§48); the thorny question of how to empathise Kant'southward remarks on design (§fourteen) and whether anything in his broader theory requires such a restrictive formalism and, finally, whether Kant is committed to a perceptual theory of art. I have addressed each of these questions elsewhere (Costello Reference Costello2013); just I will say a word in closing about the terminal, since this will seem the most worrisome for the extension of Kant'southward theory to works of art that, in the instance of SNPA, I have defined equally possessing no perceptual features whatever.

However provisional, Kant's division of the arts (§51) into the 'art of speech, pictorial art, and the art of the play of sensations' makes clear that Kant took himself to be providing a general theory of art – a theory as readily applicative to music or poetry as it is to painting and the plastic arts (CPJ, five: 321). The terms in which Kant discusses poetry, in item, as an art of not-sensible 'representations of the imagination, which are evoked through words' are instructive hither (CPJ, 5: 321–two). Cypher in the aesthetic appreciation of poetry, as Kant presents information technology, requires taking pleasure in the perceptual manifold through which nosotros admission a work of poetry. Just if the way in which poems are able to stimulate the imagination without requiring presentation in sensible intuition is accommodated past Kant's theory – Kant fifty-fifty presents poesy equally the fine art form in which our capacity for artful ideas is exercised to the greatest extent – then so too is SNPA.Footnote ²⁰ Appealing to Kant'southward remarks on the aesthetic appreciation of poetry does of course have the effect of rendering SNPA an 'art of speech' – an art of 'word' or 'idea' rather than 'gesture' or 'intuition' – and WNPA, a more conventional hybrid of the ii on Kant'south taxonomy.

I welcome this conclusion. Not merely would it exist anachronistic to await Kant'southward theory to make room for works with no perceptible properties relevant to their appreciation within the pictorial arts, information technology seems entirely fitting: information technology captures the respects in which SNPA unlike WNPA – reverse to Goldie and Schellekens's endeavor to generalize the 'idea idea' – remains an farthermost position, a limit instance fifty-fifty within the domain of conceptual art. SNPA is a kind of art that relies in large part for its effects on frustrating the expectations generated by its standard contexts of dissemination and display. Kant's theory, it turns out, gets this right.Footnote ²¹

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Source: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/kantian-review/article/conceptual-art-and-aesthetic-ideas/2A596450F6FFE09D810DC16673E3005C

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