Dialogue

Some of you seem to email me, and that is fine, but I encourage those of you who would like question/ call to attention anything on this blog to comment. I am going to start posting perceptive comments, so that they do not get overlooked by general readers and to generate more of a dialogue. Here's the response I got from "Armchair Chastiser" on my complaints about obtuse conceptualism:
..as for your previous post, for such a visual dude you're sort of positing language as the supreme medium of meaning, yes? as in you seem to be assuming that a work of conceptual art is a partciular iteration of a preceding idea that is most purely (i.e. in a non-particular form) expressed in language. (Example: viewer sees fragments of frames stuck in wall and floor, thinks "ah yes, here in the 21st century we no longer have coherent or common frames through which to intepret our experiences." or something. whatever.)

so if conceptual art & imagery is always referring back to language, then yes, the issue of accessibility would be crucial: how easy should it be for the viewer to make the interpretive journey from the particular work in the gallery to the general idea that it represents, etc etc etc.

But why does the work have to be a stand-in for an idea expressed in language, any more than we think of an idea expressed in language as standing in for a work of art in a gallery somewhere? Certainly, in human experience visual meaning preceded linguistic meaning (cave dudes could see a tree and give invest it with meaning before we had any words for it, a mother's face means something to a baby even thought the baby can't even conceive of reading or talking).

and we also know that language is never pure either, but traps us in a partiular culture's (or sub-culture's) vehicles of thought, complete with blindspots. (Wittgenstien, blah blah blah).

point being the work of art should probably mean something on its own without reference back to an artist's statement. If you could fully express yourself in words, why make the art at all? You could just be a writer. methinks what's "necessary" in a work are those elements of it that go somewhere our language has yet to take us.