Another Look at Social Dimension ( 4 of 8 )

At least two projects initiated by Art & Language New York during the mid-1970s attempted to address the issue of cultural imperialism through these means. This meant that it was not merely acceptable to volunteer a solution for our comrades in the Third World; rather, it was the task of artists, critics and historians of art (and in this case, we enjoyed the representation and participation of all three professional roles) to address first the terms of complicity of Conceptual Artists - insofar as they unwittingly advanced the cause of modernism - and then invent ways to undermine the role that culture was assumed to play as an adjunct to a deeper form of underdevelopment. Both projects were conceived as public projects, insofar as they took place in museums or state-supported galleries. Both demanded that we engage the audience in a dialogue, and that for us the topics of these conversations would be grounded in our own experiences as artists living and working in New York and the sorts of problems - existential, political, economic, etc. - this fact seemed to raise. We would not necessarily apologize for the deeply embedded nature of our talk, but recognize such indexicality as part of our reality and, therefore, as part of the problem to address. We did not believe we could "transcend" the situation of unequal cultural exchange or "translate" world-views that were essentially incommensurable. To do so seemed to be to opt for moral bankruptcy and side with the bureaucrats of art and culture. There would be no standard of intelligibility save the will and energy to continue the conversation in good faith; to "go-on" as we would say. Conceptual Art notwithstanding, these public dialogues aimed to destabilize the role of the artist as yet another professional, specialist, autonomous and quaintly harmless individual. Insofar as Conceptual Art partakes of the "far-out" and "outlandish," it is, argues Ramsden, "deeply rooted in the U.S. as evidence of freedom and of the truly moral." The ideological field of Art & Language's "anti-cultural imperialism" was defined in terms of specific geographical oppositions: New York - Australia, New York - Yugoslavia, and so on. The geographical markers are intentionally disparate in status; their use points out the perceived asymmetry of "New York" as a proper name for the center of modernist art with respect to a host of "world" cultures. The group's critique of "international" modernism was a negative version of the international travelling exhibition, which gave rise to a number of possible MODELS for practice. Art & Language argued that artistic practice should be located strategically in the space revealed by the contradictions between a culturally dependent situation and that of the dominating cultural power. It was reasoned that attitudes surrounding travelling exhibitions, as well as the international art magazines, reveal these contradictions the most pointedly, since these cultural institutions already presuppose circumstances in which it is impossible to demythify any art production.

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