Donald Barthelme on Conceptual Art

Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965

BARTHELME: Conceptual art isn't something I'm overly fond of. It seems to me entirely too easy...
RUAS: Why would you say it's easy?
BARTHELME: Well, because it is easy.
RUAS: To be able to delineate concepts and have people understand the concept?
BARTHELME: Yes. I think as art it is entirely too easy.

...

BARTHELME: Had I decided to go into the conceptual-art business I could turn out railroad cars full of that stuff every day. My younger brother, who is a writer, Frederick Barthelme, was very interested in conceptual art at one time, and was as a matter of fact in a Museum of Modern Art conceptual art show, and he was friendly with Joseph Kosuth, who was sort of the papa of conceptual art. So I've listened to endless conversations about conceptual art, more than I wanted to hear about it, until my brother--who did it very well--finally stopped doing it and turned to prose on the grounds that there was not enough intellectual excitement in conceptual art. [from an interview with Charles Ruas and Judith Sherman, 1976, reprinted in Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews the Essays and Interviews by Donald Barthelme]

 

James Acord, Nuclear Artist, 1944-2011

Robert Boyd

I lived in Seattle for four years in the early 90s. For most people, that period in Seattle cultural history is remembered primarily for grunge rock, but my theory is that any city of sufficient size always has interesting art going on. Only occasionally does it break out into awareness by the rest of the world, as grunge did. Seattle's art scene, at that time, was interesting and vibrant. From my point of view, it was centered around COCA, the Center on Contemporary Art. (Unfortunately, their site doesn't contain information about exhibits prior to 2007.) At the time, it was located in a large nondescript building downtown (next to the infamous Lusty Lady), and the director was a local art impresario named Larry Reid. Reid was friends with some people in the local alternative comics community, and that's how I got to know him. And through his wonderful COCA exhibits, I got familiar with some of the most interesting Seattle-area artists. People like Charles Krafft, who will be exhibiting at PG Contemporary later this year, sound artist Trimpin, and sculptor James Acord.



photo of James Acord by Arthur S. Aubry

The first show of Acord's I saw featured piles of orange Fiesta Ware (the orange glaze was made from uranium oxide in the innocent days before WWII), the sleeve of a nuclear fuel rod (minus the fuel), and tons of paper documentation dealing with his ultimately successful attempt to become a licensed handler of nuclear materials. As far as I can tell, Acord started off as a more-or-less traditional sculptor. He became interested in sculpting granite and learned that granite typically contained a lot of uranium (which is why your granite countertops are slightly radioactive). This fact made him more and more interested in uranium as an artistic material. He studied nuclear science, moved to Richland, Washington--near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation--cut his hair into a crew-cut and started wearing suits so he could blend in better with the nuclear engineers there. When he finally got his license--the only one ever granted to an individual--he had the license number tattooed onto the back of his neck.



What I love about Acord's work the most is his single-minded devotion to one thing. He was eager to explore every artistic possibility of nuclear material. So his work ranged from traditional sculpture to process art. Displaying the bureaucratic documentation for getting his license is a far cry from sculpting a granite animal skull. But the granite sculptures are part of the overall project. The Hanford Nuclear Reservation is one of the most dangerous and polluted places on Earth, and because there is so much radioactive waste there that is likely to stay there more-or-less forever, Acord designed sculptures to warn off future humans. He wanted to create objects the would still be comprehensible 500 or 1000 years from now--when humanity might no longer be literate. His spooky sculptures and designs for large-scale "warning" sculptures are unnerving massages for the future.



James Acord, Nuclear Reliquary, 1998

James Acord died on January 9, 2011. A memorial website has been set up, and here is a video of Acord describing his obsession.

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Kyle Olson at GGallery

Robert Boyd

Sometimes you go to an exhibit and you are flummoxed. It's embarrassing to admit you really don't get it. It's worse if you like the show but don't get it than if you dislike it. Because if you dislike it and don't get it, you can just walk away and forget it. Kyle Olson is willing to say a lot about his art. It's just that nothing he says really explains much. He writes:

In describing my project or practices, I concentrate on the things that I'm not doing. Art is not a thing which benefits terribly from positive description. I approach my studio practice without a positive system. Or perhaps I attempt to tear away the mental divisions one is left with when using positive descriptions. This is one of the most beneficial explanations I can think of for my work. (untitled statement)

Thanks a heap, Kyle.

His titles, full of double negatives and paradoxes ("Not Untitled", "Called an Untitled Name", etc.), don't help much either, except to reinforce that this art's meaning is for Kyle to know and for us to find out.



Kyle Olson, Not Untitled, satin, mahogony and steel

Some of his work is pretty identifiable as art. Not this. This is one of those pieces that, as Arthur Danto wrote about Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes, needs the context of an art space to be identified as art. It's also the first piece in the show. This may be important. Olson numbers the pieces and while their location in the gallery is not in any identifiable line, they are meant to be seen in sequence. He writes:

I have loved reading comics since I was a child but I actually prefer to think of them as "sequential art." [note: people who refer to comics as "sequential art" are pretentious. Just sayin'.--ed. ]The thing I like most about them is the gutters, the space between the panels. It is this negative space that allows each reader to deviate from the fixed narration fo the comics and create an experience unique to themselves. [sic] It is this sense of sequentially [sic] that I hope to employ both within individual works and between each other.

Then the statement tells you in which order to look at the pieces. I interpret this as saying that the walk between the pieces--in order--is as much a part of the entirety of the show as are the pieces themselves.



Kyle Olson, Not Untitled and Unnamed, satin, pencil on paper, MDF [I'm not sure what MDF refers to]

The paper in this piece are stacks of post-its. In person, you can faintly see their flourescent colors through the satin covering. Of course, some of the post-its have drawings--which cannot be seen. The way the satin is bunched gives this shape the look of a white Devonian sea creature.



Kyle Olson, Not a Name, basswood, paper, gum

The strip of paper (that looks a bit like a measuring tape) is taken from a paper shredder that shredded prints of Olson's signature. The strip is taped up at Olson's height. The bowling pin? "A reference to games," Olson writes.



Kyle Olson, Not Called an Untitled Name, blown glass, bronze object, cast resin

In this piece, a simulacrum of a table has been made from cast resin. I guess it functions more-or-less as well as the table it imitates. Was the bottle also the product of skilled craftsmanship--in service of imitating something mass-produced? Could be.

Hey, maybe the title of the show, "Dedendum," will help us understand!

• Dedendum Circle: The circle through the bottom lands of a gear.
• Dedendum: The radial distance between the pitch circle and the dedendum circle. 
• Pitch Circle: Theoretical circle upon which all calculations are made. This is the circle that rools without slipping with the pitch circle of the mating gear.

Well, maybe not. I am just as flummoxed now as when I started. I liked what I looked at, but understood nothing... Go to GGallery and check it out yourself. And if you figure it out, let me know.

Note on Conceptual Art

Conceptual Art by Tony Godfrey

I don't have much to say about this highly accessible book about the least accessible of artistic movements, conceptualism. If you have any familiarity with art from about 1960 to the present (with a little pre-history courtesy of Duchamp, Picabia, etc.), most of this won't be startlingly new. A few new details will be sketched in.

But where it excels is in discussing conceptualism outside the art capitals, particularly the work of Russian conceptualists. Godfrey points out just how different the basis for creating conceptual art was in the Soviet Union when compared to the West. There is a danger of seeing the Russians as heroically creating dematerialized art in the face of a totalitarian system, compared to decadent Westerners. It's an appealing vision of heroic victims. But that is unfair to the artists. Their work and its basis are too particular to be reduced this way. This is one area I want to learn more about--particular about the place of Russian conceptual artists in the broader stream of "unofficial" Russian culture of the 60s and 70s.

There are also good chapters on feminism and photography.