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4

photograph is geometricizing life. 
Most of the artists that are now, usually mistakenly, called "conceptual" (which implies the idea is all-important), were doing "minimal" work in Winter 1967-68. Barry, Huot, Huebler, Weiner, (Joseph Kosuth less so), had all run up against the dilemma posed by Reinhardt with his "ultimate painting, ""timeless painting," "identical painting." They all found they could make good painting or sculpture but that it never went further than a certain point already stated by Ad. Greenberg and his protégés were always talking about being faithful to the medium, about toughness and advance, which made very good sense until Stella's black paintings and Ad's black squares. I think Greenberg dropped out of the vanguard with horror in 1962 when he wrote his last intelligent piece about recent art; it was only a little later that he found out that the fidelity idea led straight to minimalism instead of staying with pretty formal color painting. Reinhardt and Greenberg god knows, had little in common, but in the 50's they both saw that advance was necessary to American art. What happened was that it got to the point where painting and sculpture couldn't be "advanced" any more. Joseph Kosuth took Reinhardt's "art-as-art" and changed it into"art as idea." His store-front "Museum of Normal Art" was sort of dedicated to Ad; a stat of one of the "dogmas" hung over the desk. The first indications I had of an increasingly de-materialized or non-object art tendency was from seeing work by the Englishmen Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin (The art and Language group), the German Hanne Darboven, and by Dan Graham, Rick Barthelme, Christine Kozlov and Kosuth at the Museum of Normal Art in 1967. 
In February 1968 I went out to Vancouver and met Iain Baxter. He had just begun to work in a conceptual vein and we stayed up all night talking, with him telling me about his ideas and me telling him about things people I knew were doing. We were both terribly excited about the conjunctions of ideas that had arisen totally independently and simultaneously. None of these things had been published at that point and there was no way he could have known about the New York and European work. We were dealing with ideas literally "in the air". Communications between the various scattered artists were just getting underway, John Chandler's