Materializing "Six Years"

Materializing "Six Years": Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art, an exhibition presently on display at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, revolves, with centripetal force, around Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, a loose, flowing book-as-bibliography. Published in 1973 by the art critic Lucy Lippard, the book is composed of alternating commentary and black and white reproductions documenting the contemporary avant-garde. The full title actually continues for sixty more words, outlining the boundaries of what the cover refers to as "so-called conceptual art." This might alert you that the ground covered will not be uncontested territory. (What fun would it be if it were? But Lippard's gloss, from a prefatory essay, might be provisionally helpful: so-called, then, because it's "work where the idea is paramount and the materialized form secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or 'dematerialized.'")

Chronologically documenting books, exhibitions, and individual works, the original Six Years was methodological in its format — with citations of exhibitions, publications and events in bold type, excerpts from texts in roman, and the author's commentary in italic — and idiosyncratic in manner, with a knowingly arbitrary selection of works and events and ruminative annotations. Lippard's approach to the commentary was both unusually generous and playfully argumentative, so despite the appearance of the apparently rigorous structure of the chronological bibliography, the book reads much more loosely: of the recondite theoretical publications of the conceptual art group Art-Language, she wrote "I don't understand a good deal of what is said… but I admire the investigatory energies. In the land of Quine and Rroses inhabited by A-L, 'direct experience' doesn't exist until it has been made indirect".

The exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum follows the book's chronology closely. Near the entrance, one encounters the poster and original text for Art-Language's 1966 Air Conditioning show (in addition to their elaborate artist statement, the show consisted only of an air conditioner set to match the room's temperature to that of the ambient conditions outside the gallery). Lippard's original notes for the book are held by the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian, and the curators have made extensive borrowings, and artfully arranged the various supporting material around the works themselves. (Full disclosure: as an archivist I may be unusually excited by mouldy letterhead.)

Some re-installations of the work have strong gravitational pull today, often seemingly more so than when they first appeared. In Christine Kozlov's 1971 Information: No Theory, a microphone records the noise of its surroundings onto quarter-inch tape that has been spliced into a short loop, thereby instantly recording over whatever was just taken down. Tape does not completely destroy the information it records: it's an audio palimpsest, and the set-up resonates especially well in a world when the immediate past is constantly being marked and covered up and forgotten underneath the constant cycling of information gathering technology.

But one of the joys of Lippard's book is that the works appear among Lippard's remarks, and the wily arrangements within the chronology give the primary texts an awkward eminence over the reproductions of the art itself. In Sentences on Conceptual Art, a manifesto-like numbered list of observations, Sol LeWitt makes a distinction between his own conceptual work ("with a 'small c'") — and the more militantly dematerialized. But even here the language can be a bit ponderous — "All ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conventions of art".

(After the artist Vladimir Umamets scribbled his name, followed by "a potential piece of yellowism" on a Rothko at the Tate Modern last October, his fellow "yellowist" Marcin Lodyga blew a raspberry at the establishment in language mocking conceptual art's high manner: "Inside the context of yellowism all emotions and feelings captured by images and emotions and feelings which these images can arouse in potential viewers, express yellow colour and nothing more.")

It's perhaps unsurprising, given the reputations of the respective cities, that to today's ears many of the conceptualists based in New York or London (Joseph Kosuth, Art–Language) can sound gratingly self-serious, whereas the obstreperous contributions from Amsterdam or Los Angeles (Jan Dibbets, Ed Ruscha), seem less eager to be grouped together, much less take up arms for aesthetic theory. Their "dematerialization" often seemed like a political act only in as much as it was so much unruly effervescence.

The premise of Materializing "Six Years" — to assemble the works that were arrayed in Lippard's book — might seem odd. After all, given that the specific focus of this documentary project was that its various subjects were united by the state of their "dematerialization" — isn't it slightly perverse to, forty years after the fact, arrange for the works (or their representative documentation) to neatly — even preciously — materialize?

But the nature of our usual access to these works today — dematerialized again into digital representations of objects that are themselves secondary to concepts — is sufficiently strange to give their assemblage here a certain material, as well as conceptual, heft. Lippard, in a foreword to the Six Years reprint, notes that much of the original documentation didn't make it into the printed version, and some of the more interesting offshoots can be seen here.

Despite the wall text's claim that part of the book's appeal is that there is "very little commentary" allowing the works to "speak for themselves," this viewer wished, at least, that he could walk through the show with some more of that commentary, possibly gleaned from the archive and added to the wall labels. To me, it's principally that personality — in commentary, ordering and structure — that gave the book its lasting interest.

It's funny, I guess, that Six Years ended up endowing this specific group of often "ephemeral" works with a historical anchor, but if nothing else it's heartening to see how they look together today: a slightly ragtag but still impressive Conceptualist class reunion. Left with only the works and certain documentary traces of the author one suspects it's less fun than the first time around. Still, Materializing "Six Years" serves to reminds us — as Lippard put it in her reflective essay Escape Attempts:

"The process of extending the boundaries didn't stop with Conceptual art: These energies are still out there, waiting for artists to plug into them, potential fuel for the expansion of what "art" can mean. The escape was temporary. Art was recaptured and sent back to its white cell, but parole is always a possibility."Zachary Sachs (@cerealrecords)

Through 17 February 2013
Materializing "Six Years": Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art
Brooklyn Museum of Art
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York