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Benjamin Buchloh Replies to Joseph Kosuth and Seth Siegelaub

1991; The MIT Press; Volume: 57; Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/778877

1536-013X

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,

Law in Society and Culture

I am a bit disappointed that Joseph Kosuth refused to take me up on the critical and scholarly exchange that seemed possible after our original interview/ discussion conducted during the research in preparation of my essay. It was in a spirit of critical debate that I had written this essay concerning historical and theoretical questions within the complex field of activities that is now inevitably and irreversibly compounded under the stylistic epithet Conceptual Art. I had deliberately refrained from provocative polemics in both tone and information in order to continue that critical exchange. The careful reader can easily recognize that my essay does not in fact contain any accusations or polemics directed specifically at Joseph Kosuth or his work (unless one would consider it an insult to voice a very hesitant doubt that is buried in a footnote and introduced with the explicit proviso that . for the time being and until further evidence may be produced ...). Instead of responding to the proposal to look at the history of conceptual art from a position of critical distance, Kosuth has reacted with a massive assault consisting of blackmail (of the curators who originally published my essay in the exhibition catalog, whom he threatened with withdrawing his work from the exhibition unless they would cede the most important space in the exhibition to his work and glue his printed reply, supplied on the day of the opening, into the already printed catalog) and ad hominem insults to which I have no reason to respond. What I would like to respond to, however, is the evidence of a common art-world attitude in Kosuth's reaction that is symptomatic in its fusion of paranoia and the compulsion to control. Artistic practice from this perspective is not a dialogic enterprise where critical questions can be asked, challenges and provocative hypotheses can be posed, and answers and counterchallenges can be returned. By contrast, it is an enterprise of the culture industry and its products, whose international dissemination has to be protected (like corporate products in general) from any challenge by critics-the leftover nuisance from the old days when artistic practice still aspired to operate in the public sphere. It seems that in the mind of artists like Kosuth, artistic practice is a matter of image control and product protection, of territorial strategies, networked or, if necessary, extorted in the various institutional and commercial venues that facilitate the work's continued circulation and guarantee its mythical status.