Jan Verwoert: 'Secret Society'
We encounter Conceptual art today as an art of coded signs: encrypted messages typed out on yellowing sheets of paper or enigmatic gestures captured in black and white photographs and deteriorating videotapes gone fuzzy with time. At the heart of the code, we sense the presence of a secret: the key to a way of thinking and of doing things that seems intimately connected to the spirit of the early 1970s. To understand the meaning of the radical rupture that Conceptual art constitutes, one would need to find a way of tapping the experience from which it resulted. To say that Conceptual art became hermetic is a way of describing a specific sensation, namely – to attempt a shorthand definition of ‘hermetic’ – that of confronting artefacts or articulations that defy common modes of interpretation and instead, through innuendo, hint at a body of experiences into which one would have to initiate oneself first to be able to grasp the full implications of their significance.
Admittedly, this approach directly contradicts the declared objectives of Conceptual art voiced by many of its first-generation proponents. This was the idea that idea art was revolutionary transparency; and that the purpose of using text or photographic/video documentation was to say what you meant by simply saying it and to show what you wanted to do by simply doing it, in the hope that this commitment to clarity would destroy the traditional cult of art which relies precisely on the senseless custom of having to initiate oneself into hermetic codes of connoisseurship and taste. In this sense, the stakes of Conceptual art were to further the emancipatory project of Modernism and to create an artistic language that would be as universally understandable, and therefore democratically accessible, as pure information. In terms of professional politics, getting your ideas straight to the public as an artist (and thus making sure that your work was understood as you wanted it to be) was meant to cut out the middle men – critics, historians, gallerists, curators – who capitalize on the power of art’s institutions to fix the meaning and value of a work. In terms of a wider sense of social politics, speaking out openly in the realm of art was held to be a means – to use the political idiom of the day – of ‘sticking it to the man’.
But, maybe things were never that clear to start with. Perhaps conceptual working methods were always riddled with the performative contradictions inherent to the attempt to create a new artistic code for code-free communication. And it could be precisely these contradictions that make Conceptual art worth engaging with today. If the conceptual turn in art constituted a rupture, the point now may be to open up the rift within that rupture. So, let’s look for ways to open that rift.
One work that could be such a starting point for this – marking, as it does, a critical tipping point in the course of Conceptual art unfolding its hermeticism – is Art & Language’s contribution to Documenta 5, Index 001 (1972). The work consists of four black filing cabinets on plinths, the drawers of which contain essays on art and its politics written by, and circulated among, the members of the artists’ group, which was founded in 1968 with one branch in the UK and one in the USA. On the gallery wall is a text: long columns of numbers and letters that would indicate, were one to decipher their code, who read which text when and changed what. On the one hand, the didactical, library-like mise en scene conveys a commitment to transparency as the group discloses its production process to the public. The members of Art & Language dedicated themselves to the ongoing critical discussion of art’s conceptual premises that, among other manifestations, was relayed through publishing journals such as Art-Language or The Fox. If you sought to gain access to the group’s discourse, Index 001 would indeed offer you what core members Ian Burn, Joseph Kosuth and Mel Ramsden termed a ‘learning situation’. On the other hand, as a mode of visual address, the enigmatic columns of code and cool black boxes full of files constituted a deliberate affront to any casual visitor, a stand-offish gesture stating that anyone unwilling to initiate themselves into the lore of Art & Language would get nothing out of the work. To position itself publicly, the group chose to use two modes of address simultaneously: the gesture of public accessibility and the embracing of the hermetic.
