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.Pop’s bright icons flashed.Five words in neon, Joseph Kosuth’s self-referential conceptual work borrowed the signage technology of bars and diners.Bruce Nauman, a bad boy, highly irreverent, and not-quite-categorisable as either conceptual or pop artist, made playfully sly works employing the same glowing gas tube medium.The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign), 1967, rendered in neon is an irresistible work.The title is so pointedly and poignantly funny in its acknowledgement of the pretentiousness of traditional beliefs and the hollowness left by throwing them away.Any sign will do, window or wall, and the role of the artist is generically defined.We can read this piece even better by putting it in relation to two others, close in time, the kinetic flashing, punning Suite Substitute (1968) and double-entendre Run From Fear, Fun from Rear (1972).All eschew the elite intellectual cool of high conceptualism, swapping in a vernacular tone.Suite and Run are trivial and silly, they are just fun, goofy, seriously unserious.The willingness to change register redeems Nauman, keeps him from sanctimonious pieties of pretentious intellectualism.Modernism may have had its indépendants, anti-salonistes, dada player’s, avant-garde breakers-of-form and rejecters-of-tradition, but the unapologetic and unframed appropriation of commercial and industrial methods, images, and language became the signature gesture of 20th century late modernism.Gone was the angst, the romantic yearning for the sublime, replaced by a wry engagement with the absurdly ridiculous and blatantly commercial-industrial.In a word, “pop,” that playful vernacular idiomatic smart-game of art flirted seriously with its once-terrifying nemesis—mass culture.Nauman is not Picasso, taking mass-made materials into the frame of art to show how unshakable was the separation of high/low, a formalist inventor.And he is not the conceptual arch-humorist Duchamp, naming, signing, gesturing, framing exposing the strategies of art making to make agile motions of intervention and détournement avant-la-lettre in his punning games and twists of phrase and reference frame.Nauman’s pop-conceptualism went way beyond these modern dalliances and like the work of the greats—Warhol, Rosenquist, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg–launched a full-scale all-out liaison with the mass culture universe.This wasn’t a one-time act of appropriation or a limited borrowing of stuff for the sake of formal novelty (cubism).Nor was it an act of superiority according to old paradigms in which the culture industries were held in high disdain.The oppositional attack vanished (or was banished) with pop’s vibrant games.Nauman signals that change and embodies it, with his still shocking but none-the-less darkly amusing Clown Torture videos, his coyly inaccessible underground chambers with their cameras reporting on the nothing that happens, and other smartly innovative interventions in the normative modes of art and media production.Hardly a display of Frankfurt School critical theory, Nauman’s aspirations sit in the limbo hinge zone, right on the edge between older modes mid-century high-modern distance from all manner of things mass and mediated and the coming post-modern enthusiasm for a cool and distanced use of the materials of the culture it criticises.Nauman just knows that neon looks great when it flashes, that it catches the eye and holds it in the dynamic on-off display of vivid simple lines arcing across dark space.His boyish jokes continued for decades, with pokes in the eye and an instantaneous erection as a greeting.These works have the political savvy of a bar joke (i.e.none) combined with a capacity to disarm.It’s funny, after all, that abrupt sign of silly hostility or virility, right there, bonk! in your face, uncensored, unedited, kind of dumb and great at the same time.But something else is also at work in Nauman’s engagement with language, a hint at the beginnings of a story returning to the stage.A tale waits to be told and, in its telling, will reconnect these works with their situations and circumstances.The language Nauman uses isn’t that of high conceptualism.It’s vernacular, popular, and funny.Nauman was willing to be flatfooted and dopey in his literalism (the photograph of the word being waxed in “Waxing Hot” or the photo of the artist devouring letters in “Eating my words”) at a time when conceptual artists’ engagement with language was often couched in the most esoterically sophisticated philosophical terms.Both Kosuth (above mentioned) and Mel Bochner made a self-conscious display of their Wittgensteinian credentials.The idea is a machine that makes art.Sol Lewitt’s condensed image of conceptual production betrays its links to the industrial system through the specific image of its metaphor.The idea of art as idea, Kosuth’s version, shifted the material ground out from under the work.That was the crucial sixties move—onto the conceptual high ground.Production values can’t compete.Art is nothing in relation to mass material culture, its mediated frenzies and production capabilities, a tiny marginal boutique activity that validates certain ideological concepts the way the gold standard works its efficacy in the economic systems of symbolic exchange.Conceptualism wasn’t invented in the 1960s.Even before Duchamp, the symbolist painters Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau were passionate artists of ideas, as was Dante Gabriel Rossetti (as Jerome McGann is never weary of reminding us).Idea-based art gave the lie to realism in the 19th century while engaging in elaborate visual artifices.Idea-based art attempted to diminish the claims of visual, optical practice in the 1960s, by swapping in language as if it had no material presence or character.The difference is profound.1960s conceptualism is not monolithic.If Kosuth found in language a near-immaterial (in his mind) way to make an art of ideas, then Nauman recharged that idea with a vibrant materiality so that his language pulsed and blinked and assaulted its viewers with a constant reminder of the mediated condition of all expressions of form.Once that insistence comes back into the picture (literally, as the way these objects are made, metaphorically, as into the frame of critical apprehension), then the historical and cultural circumstances of production aren’t far behind.The language games of conceptualism were far from the field of political battle.The Wall of Resistance, a striking counter-war project organised by artists protesting the Vietnam war, was one of a series of actions that showed the cracks in the belief system about the way abstract and esoteric work could function in any “political” sense.Does the aestheticisation of language-as-image in conceptualism and pop coincide too conveniently with a shift in public discourse? Narrative had long been eliminated within the modern approach to visuality and image making, and the passing of reference from language is only a later phase of this attempt at a visuality of “plenitude” or “full presence” as we were once wont to say.This issue of narrative will recur, as a way to ask about the role of image making, fine art, and the reference frame of so-called “symbolic” forms [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]