Anywhere or Not At All. Peter Osborne
written 170 years later, towards the end of 1968, and published in the fifth issue of Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer’s journal, 0–9, in New York in January 1969. They were then reprinted in the first issue of Art–Language, the journal of the British conceptual art group Art & Language, in May of the same year.43 The three contexts of publication are similar in various ways. The Athenaeum was the short-lived experimental journal (just six issues, 1798–1800) of a handful of poet-critic-philosophers: in particular, the Schlegel brothers (August and Friedrich), Friedrich Schleiermacher and Novalis – and especially with regard to the concept of art, Friedrich Schlegel. In it, what would become known in the European tradition simply as ‘literature’ (later, ‘writing’) achieved its first forms of theoretical and practical self-consciousness. 0–9 and Art–Language were, similarly, ‘small magazines’ – self-published in the manner of the 1960s, printing or mimeographing just 200 or 300 copies of each issue, a print run not so different from those of the 1790s. In these issues, what would soon become known as ‘conceptual art’ achieved some of its first forms of theoretical and practical self-consciousness.
0–9 was essentially a journal of avant-garde poetry, influenced by John Ashbery. (It is important to remember that in the mid-1960s, figures like Carl Andre and Dan Graham still saw them themselves, in large part, as poets.) Language works in journals like this (such as Aspen, which published Graham’s important work Scheme in 1965) explored the boundaries between concrete poetry, notation, instructions for performances, and criticism, in a fluid experimental manner that helped create the conditions for what would shortly become identified as conceptual art.44 By 1969, however, the energy of this kind of work, which had its roots in the late 1950s, was becoming dissipated, in part precisely because of the rise of ‘conceptual art’ as a distinct artistic genre. Number 5 was the penultimate issue of 0–9; the final issue appeared in July 1969. LeWitt had already published his influential ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ in the mainstream Artforum in summer 1967, eighteen months previously. It was thus not surprising to see his Sentences reproduced, alongside Graham’s 1966 Poem-Schema and Laurence Weiner’s 1968 Statements, in the first issue of Art–Language, the self-declared ‘Journal of Conceptual Art’, as a sample of the latest US conceptual art for British readers.
Art–Language was the journal of an intellectual avant-garde too. However, it was moving reflectively from ‘art’ towards ‘philosophy’, rather than from ‘poetry’ to ‘art’ – each, here, a distinct aspect of what in The Athenaeum was a single movement. Furthermore, the philosophy that so fascinated Art & Language was of an analytical, logico-linguistic variety. In the context of Art–Language, the poetic dimension of LeWitt’s Sentences was thus downplayed, to the point of its erasure, in favour of its ‘purely’ or ideally conceptual content. Placing LeWitt’s Sentences in the context of Athenaeum Fragments allows us to revive something of their formal dimension in a philosophical manner unrelated to the kind of philosophical work that so fascinated Art & Language, but which nonetheless occupies some of the same conceptual space.
Still, this might seem an idiosyncratic and arbitrary conjunction, dreamt up across a gap of 170 years, between two continents, in the spirit of a surrealistic montage. And there is indeed something of surrealist montage about this. However, there is a method in this madness (as there was in surrealism). It is not an arbitrary connection – the method of what Walter Benjamin called the construction of ‘an image at the now of recognizability’, or what we might call the experimental method of montage as the means of production of historical intelligibility. This is the basic method of a post-Hegelian philosophy of history. As Benjamin wrote in one of the notes for his Arcades Project:
It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, an image is that wherein what has been come together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural [bildlich]. Only dialectical images are genuinely historical … The image that is read … [is] the image in the now of its recognizability [das Bild im Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit] …45
There is a ‘particular recognizability’ to the ‘now’ of LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art today (1969 in 2011), through which it ‘enters into legibility’ with the ‘then’ of the Athenaeum Fragments (1798 in 2011): the recognizability of philosophical romanticism in conceptual art, and thereby, conversely, the retrospective anticipation of conceptual art in philosophical romanticism itself. Or to put it another way, at the level of their critical historical intelligibility, there is a mutual constitution of philosophical romanticism and conceptual art, through which they acquire a conjoint contemporaneity. The dialectical image constructed by the relation between the then of the Athenaeum Fragments and the now of Sentences on Conceptual Art produces an image of romanticism as a conceptual art, and an image of conceptualism as a romantic art.46
I shall proceed by concentrating on two concepts at the heart of philosophical romanticism and contemporary art alike – fragment and project – as lenses through which to focus a reading of LeWitt’s Sentences, which will, I hope, help to give new meaning to these terms in turn. The point is not to assimilate LeWitt to philosophical romanticism, or vice versa, but rather to constellate their terms, transforming the historical meaning of each. On the Benjaminian model of historical intelligibility that I am using here: ‘Historical “understanding” (Verstehen) is to be grasped, in principle, as an afterlife (Nachleben) of that which is understood.’47 In this sense, LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art is part of the afterlife of philosophical romanticism; just as this analysis is part of the afterlife of Sentences itself.
By philosophical romanticism, I mean something quite precise: namely, that body of thought produced in Jena in the second half of the 1790s, whose main representatives were the authors of The Athenaeum along with (among others), most importantly, Friedrich Hölderlin. It is also known as ‘early German Romanticism’. This was a moment defined, for Friedrich Schlegel, by the conjunction of a political event, a philosophical event and a literary event: ‘the French Revolution, Fichte’s philosophy, and Goethe’s [Wilhelm] Meister’, which he described as the three ‘greatest tendencies of the age’ [AF 216]. Many of the ideas central to the understanding of modern and contemporary art – indeed, the philosophical concepts of art and criticism themselves – derive from the writings of this small group in this brief period: fragment and project, but also the ideas of the new, of collective (anonymous or pseudonymous) production (see Chapter 1, above), of the dissolution of genres into an artistic process of infinite becoming (see Chapters 3 and 4, below) and, finally, the incomprehensible (the topic of the final essay/fragment in the last issue of the Athenaeum). ‘Fragments’ is a text that distils much of the art-critical significance of this philosophical romanticism.
But what is it about Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art that suggests it be constellated with this romanticism? After all, as far as I am aware, there is no philological connection, no ‘influence’ in an empirical art-historical sense, no ‘appearance of continuity’ – as Benjamin defined tradition. LeWitt is more commonly associated with the North American reception of Eastern philosophy, than with Romanticism. In fact, the significance of philosophical romanticism for the understanding of the plastic arts was increasingly obscured from the late nineteenth century onwards, by its literary origins, once the generic term ‘art’ [Kunst], whose meaning it articulated, migrated from the field of literature to the plastic arts. In its place came the preoccupation with notions of ‘medium’ and ‘aesthetic’, with an emphasis on the specific visuality or opticality of works, which further separated three-dimensional work from the heritage of the early romanticism. It is interesting just how unproblematic the distinction between ‘art’ and ‘literature’ remains in LeWitt’s Sentences, despite its explicit opposition to the limitations imposed by conventional concepts of medium:
8. When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations.
Yet, it is claimed:
16.