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Lippard -6

Larry Weiner and Joseph Kosuth are still very much concerned with art, with retaining....

UM: A trade-mark?

LL: No, not a trademark so much as a consistency or coherency. They continue in a very definite straight line and exclude more than they include, which is a fundamentally formal or structural point of view. Morris and Baxter and Nauman come closer to a Dada-Surrealist viewpoint. That's an acceptive approach where the formal approach is rejective. There's always been that kind of split. It used to be the old classical-romantic thing, but in the last couple of years [[strikethrough]] they've [[/strikethrough]] those terms have become pretty irrelevant, or confused. Barry, for instance, is a very classical and a very romantic artist at the same time. The break, and it's often a very subtle one too, comes through acceptance or rejection of the multiplicity of non-art subject matter, or in the case of Barry or Huebler or Weiner, who use non-art, immaterial situations, the imposition of a closed instead of an open system. Barry doesn't "claim" all psychic phenomena, as Iain Baxter might; he selects his pieces very strictly even when he can't know or name the phenomena, but can only impose conditions on them. Fundamentally it's a matter of degree of acceptance. 

I've always been involved schizophrenically in two extremes -- in Dada and in ultra constructivist, or clear, [[strikethrough]] hard [[/strikethrough]] pure idioms. I suppose I get interested in eccentric abstraction because it combined the two, using something unclear, peculiar, irrational, within a very clear system. When I was working on Reinhardt I was aware that the tie between these two approaches lies in their common desire for a tabula rasa, the idea that you can push something to the point where everything breaks open again and is renewed. "The end is the beginning". Both of these approaches are idealist and revolutionary; and  Utopian, but I don't think there's anything wrong with Utopianism today. We have the technological means to make life better and more human; we might as well go all out instead of continuing our highly unsuccessful methods of compromise and gradualism for changing the world.

UM: Barry said to me "Art like nothing else has an innate potential of renewing itself." 

I think Nauman is very important. 

LL: Yes, and he hasn't gotten the credit he deserves. For instance, 

Transcription Notes:
by the word UM: is in red pen LA#