From Looking to Reading: Text-Based Conceptual Art and Typographic Discourse

摘要

I begin this discussion with a quote from Peter Osborne's book on Conceptual Art, where he notes how: At its best, "Conceptual Art was never quite sure where the work was:" because it was never just in one place, or even one kind of place... Making this apparent, in opposition to the monistic materialism of Greenberg's late modernist criticism, was the most critically productive use of written language in the art of the 1960s... However, this does not mean that the visual dimension of linguistic inscription is irrelevant, even when it is the function of such inscription to negate the intrinsic significance of visual form. On the contrary, it is precisely its "unmarked" or neutral visual quality that performs the negation. In... many [artworks] of the period, this was achieved via design decisions associated with "publishing," rather than with "art."