Conceptual Art and the Reception of Duchamp

Abstract

Benjamin Buchloh: Having seen the Robert Morris exhibition one more time, yesterday, and having seen the Cardfile piece, I was confirmed in an earlier assumption which I couldn't really verify before, since I didn't then have access to the detailed contents of the piece: namely that Morris's work is constitutive for the beginning of Conceptual art in the American context. On every level, it anticipates-in the same way incidentally, as the I-Box does-the three questions that are crucial for the program of Conceptual as I see it: one, the specific question of how traditional forms of markmaking can be displaced by an exclusively photographic or textual operation of recording and documentation; second, and more complicated perhaps, the question of how the legacy of Duchamp was transformed from its first level of reception in the work ofJasperJohns to the second level in Morriswhat one might call the semiological, or the structural/linguistic axis; and third, and more commonly, the radical dismantling of all traditional definitions of objects and categories-the dematerialization of the work of art, as Lucy Lippard called it-and its transfer onto the linguistic, the photographic, and the site-specific operations within which Conceptual art was defined.