Black Bucket Essays
Volume 1, Issue 1
“The survival of my own ideas may not be as important as a condition I might create for others’ ideas to be realized. ”
- Mel Chin
Phil Hessler
‘The survival of ideas’ – this set of words incites a memory of the work A Heap of Language by Robert Smithson. Smithson, without whom many artists would not have considered expanses of time as simultaneously minute and vast nor conceived of distances as simultaneously measured and unrestricted; what will happen to his collected writings? When the book comes up for publishing in two hundred years, it is likely to be relegated to the same place as the writings of the utopian socialist Henri Saint-Simon. It may be someplace, but it will not be as relevant—a fact about which Smithson would be clear. Where does scrap go? Where does language go? Like everything, it ends up in a heap. A condition created to help others’ ideas be realized may not be as important as the certainty of the heap.
Before getting lost at the prospect of losing words that were written to instantiate the loss implicit in time, it is sensible to look at another aspect of Chin’s quote. What exactly is the projected ‘condition’ that he is helping to forge for artists? If Mel Chin stands for an aesthetic that finds new paradigms and audiences for art’s release, that serves as a democratized protest against purportedly democratic systems, that updates a conceptualism with bloodlines in the political, then there is a lot of value at stake in the creation of this “condition” for artists who have not lost some of the utopianism named by Blake Stimson as “Conceptualism’s promise.” Holding up the viability and utopianism of Chin’s projects to higher scrutiny requires more words than allotted here. But these can be set aside, as Chin has probably had to do, to proceed with the work.
So what description could one offer in place of this creation of a “condition,” in order to unpack the concept? Workspace? Environment? These don’t quite do it. One could borrow the description “operational category” intended by Max Kozloff as an insult against work of this exact sort. The essay from which this phrase is taken, the sour and paradoxically insightful essay “The Problem with Art-as-Idea,” may provide more than just a nickname for Mel Chin’s “condition.” Another of Kozloff’s denunciations, “residual art” would be a really fitting description of Smithson’s work.
The uncanny ability of a critic like Kozloff to use words in order to chafe the reader suggests an idea. What if one were to take Marx’s metaphor of the camera obscura, showing social and material relations in perpetually inverted form, and apply it to Kozloff’s essay? Take everything that Kozloff labels as false, make it true. Problematizing a work of theory in this way both unmasks some of the value the essay has (he cannot have gotten everything wrong) and can usurp its words, drawing that language from the heap in order to flip it over.
1. Blake Stimson, ¨The Promise of Conceptual Art,¨ Conceptual Art, A Critical Anthology, (MIT Press, 1999) “Conceptualism’s promise, [which] has always turned on its claim to have emerged as the art of a time in which such concerns with institutions and audiences were unusually pressing and exceptionally available to reevaluation.”
2. Max Kozloff, “The Problem with Art-as-Idea,” reprinted in Conceptual Art, A Critical Anthology, (MIT Press, 1999)
Volume 1, Issue 1
“The survival of my own ideas may not be as important as a condition I might create for others’ ideas to be realized. ”
- Mel Chin
Phil Hessler
‘The survival of ideas’ – this set of words incites a memory of the work A Heap of Language by Robert Smithson. Smithson, without whom many artists would not have considered expanses of time as simultaneously minute and vast nor conceived of distances as simultaneously measured and unrestricted; what will happen to his collected writings? When the book comes up for publishing in two hundred years, it is likely to be relegated to the same place as the writings of the utopian socialist Henri Saint-Simon. It may be someplace, but it will not be as relevant—a fact about which Smithson would be clear. Where does scrap go? Where does language go? Like everything, it ends up in a heap. A condition created to help others’ ideas be realized may not be as important as the certainty of the heap.
Before getting lost at the prospect of losing words that were written to instantiate the loss implicit in time, it is sensible to look at another aspect of Chin’s quote. What exactly is the projected ‘condition’ that he is helping to forge for artists? If Mel Chin stands for an aesthetic that finds new paradigms and audiences for art’s release, that serves as a democratized protest against purportedly democratic systems, that updates a conceptualism with bloodlines in the political, then there is a lot of value at stake in the creation of this “condition” for artists who have not lost some of the utopianism named by Blake Stimson as “Conceptualism’s promise.” Holding up the viability and utopianism of Chin’s projects to higher scrutiny requires more words than allotted here. But these can be set aside, as Chin has probably had to do, to proceed with the work.
So what description could one offer in place of this creation of a “condition,” in order to unpack the concept? Workspace? Environment? These don’t quite do it. One could borrow the description “operational category” intended by Max Kozloff as an insult against work of this exact sort. The essay from which this phrase is taken, the sour and paradoxically insightful essay “The Problem with Art-as-Idea,” may provide more than just a nickname for Mel Chin’s “condition.” Another of Kozloff’s denunciations, “residual art” would be a really fitting description of Smithson’s work.
The uncanny ability of a critic like Kozloff to use words in order to chafe the reader suggests an idea. What if one were to take Marx’s metaphor of the camera obscura, showing social and material relations in perpetually inverted form, and apply it to Kozloff’s essay? Take everything that Kozloff labels as false, make it true. Problematizing a work of theory in this way both unmasks some of the value the essay has (he cannot have gotten everything wrong) and can usurp its words, drawing that language from the heap in order to flip it over.
1. Blake Stimson, ¨The Promise of Conceptual Art,¨ Conceptual Art, A Critical Anthology, (MIT Press, 1999) “Conceptualism’s promise, [which] has always turned on its claim to have emerged as the art of a time in which such concerns with institutions and audiences were unusually pressing and exceptionally available to reevaluation.”
2. Max Kozloff, “The Problem with Art-as-Idea,” reprinted in Conceptual Art, A Critical Anthology, (MIT Press, 1999)
