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Language Between Performance and Photography

Language Between Performance and Photography Language Between Performance and Photography LIZ KOTZ Efforts to theorize the emergence of what can properly be called Conceptual art have struggled to determine the movement’s relationship to the linguistic, poet ic, and per format ive pract ices associated with the pr ior moment of Happenings and Fluxus. More is at stake here than historicist questions of influence or precedents. The tendency to take at face value various claims—about the Conceptualist suppression of the object in favor of analytic statements or “information”—obscures what may be some of the most important accomplishments of this work. To understand how the use of language in Conceptual art emerges from, and also breaks with, a more object-based notion of process and an overtly performancebased model of spectatorial interaction, we must understand it in a crucial historical context: the larger shift from the perception-oriented and “participatory” postCagean paradigms of the early 1960s to the representational, systematized, and self-reflexive structures of Conceptual art. Although there is a tendency to see language as something like the “signature style” of Conceptual work, it is important to remember that the turn to language as an artistic material occurs earlier, with the profusion of text-based scores, instructions, and http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png October MIT Press

Language Between Performance and Photography

Kotz, Liz
October , Volume Winter 2005 (111) – Jan 1, 2005
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References (6)

Publisher
MIT Press
Copyright
© 2005 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ISSN
0162-2870
eISSN
1536-013X
DOI
10.1162/0162287053148148
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Language Between Performance and Photography LIZ KOTZ Efforts to theorize the emergence of what can properly be called Conceptual art have struggled to determine the movement’s relationship to the linguistic, poet ic, and per format ive pract ices associated with the pr ior moment of Happenings and Fluxus. More is at stake here than historicist questions of influence or precedents. The tendency to take at face value various claims—about the Conceptualist suppression of the object in favor of analytic statements or “information”—obscures what may be some of the most important accomplishments of this work. To understand how the use of language in Conceptual art emerges from, and also breaks with, a more object-based notion of process and an overtly performancebased model of spectatorial interaction, we must understand it in a crucial historical context: the larger shift from the perception-oriented and “participatory” postCagean paradigms of the early 1960s to the representational, systematized, and self-reflexive structures of Conceptual art. Although there is a tendency to see language as something like the “signature style” of Conceptual work, it is important to remember that the turn to language as an artistic material occurs earlier, with the profusion of text-based scores, instructions, and

Journal

October – MIT Press

Published: Jan 1, 2005

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