Is there life after the death of the author—craig owens

Shortly after the opening of Hans Haacke's retrospective "All Connected" (October 24, 2019-January 26, 2020) at the New Museum in New York, the magazine Monopol named the artist as the most influential personality in the art world for 2019, citing Haacke's "activism" in light of the "new politicization of art." The publication supported its claim with allusions to Shapolsky et al.

Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May z, 1971 (1971), a work that contributed to the cancellation of his solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York that same year. The story is well known: The then-director of the Guggenheim, Thomas M. Messer, defended the termination of the show, just weeks before the scheduled opening, as an interception of an "alien substance that had entered the art museum organism." He understood the piece a set of photographs and documents related to a swathe of New York City residential and commercial properties—as a form of photojournalism designed to incriminate specific individuals, a goal he considered beyond the purview of legitimate art and symbolic representation "using political means to achieve political ends." In 1976, the conceptual artist and member of the group Art & Language, Mel Ramsden, wrote an essay on Haacke's publication, Framing and Being Framed: 7 Works 1970-75(1975) in the third (and final) issue of The Fox, in which he turned Messer's argument on its head. Besides Haacke's general dependency on the institutions of art for his work to function, the article also critiqued the role of critical discourse around his practice, which, according to Ramsden, contributed to the categorization and reification of the "political challenges" of artistic work within the framework of art. Surveying the past and present of institutional critique, according to Aruna D'Souzas review of the New Museum show, one finds that reflexive and critical gestures such as Haacke's have been assimilated and absorbed into the imperative of present institutions to reflect open-minded, progressive values, regardless of their actual investments. These topics of discussion-including the "institutionaliza-tion" of specific art practices (sometimes legitimized through censorship and rejection), the perceived threat of intrinsic values and genuine meaning of art works, and the end of the "political" through an acknowledgement of the epistemological and symbolic framework of art— take up arguments that are of general relevance for the historiography of institutional critique. Precisely the trope of the "end" reaches from the "birth pangs and the incessant deathbed proclamations" of the 197os, to the "rejection of all institutional critique [...] under the cynical pretense that it is now 'exhausted' or 'academic' in the mid-i98os, to the sharpened point of autonomy and functionalization in discourse around the institutionally critical practices of the 1990s. The solidification of historiography in the 2000s further bolsters this point. On the one hand, the articulation of "exit strategies" and "transversal prac-tices" is an ongoing theme, including the examination of art in its connection to social movements.® Ideas have been taken up within this discourse since the publication of Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avantgarde (1984, originally published in German in 1974), which gave wings to the phantasma of a suspension of art into a practice of life. On the other hand, there could be observed an increasing presence of institutionally critical practices within museums and discourse, the momentum of which peaked in the reception of Andrea Fraser's article "From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique" (2005), generally received as a declaration of an "end" to institutional critique as an oppositional form of practice.

In the essay republished here, "From Work to Frame, or, Is There Life after "The Death of the Author'?" Craig Owens likewise reflects on endings. Shortly following Hans Haacke's exhibition "Unfinished Business" (1986), also at the New Museum, the catalog of which Owens refers to in the text, he observes that his own analysis of the artists Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Haacke, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, and Sherrie Levine, amongst others, would certainly seem to some readers to be "ancient history," the arguments and the concomitant sensibility for context having long been established. However, Owens turns against the recurrent trope of an "end," in itself a gesture of periodization that represents a form of containment or framing, similar to how, as expressed by Pierre Bourdieu in a field-theoretical frame of reference, "the best way to shoot down your opponent is to tell him that he is finished and to consign him to the past," either by "relegating him to classicism" or by "telling him that he is past it, done for."1o On one hand, Owens insists on a de facto recognition of the social and thereby a production of art differentiated by a division of labor, in which artists (only) undertake one of various additional and equally fundamental

"functions," and on the other hand, in light of permanent changes in the field of production, asserts an essentially continuous occupation with the frames mediating these functions. Consequently, he takes into consideration artistic works, in a narrow sense, as well as the texts, publications, and editorial collaborations of the artists he discusses. From today's perspective, Owens' argumentation, which links continuity and change, is supported by the subsequent waves, phases, or generations of institutionally critical artists as well as an expansive and continuously changing notion of the institution of art.11

In February 1987, around the same time as the publication of "From Work to Frame," Owens remarked on the term "institutionalization." He understood it to be not the passage from a "pure" or "exotic" outside into the "impure" apparatus of the institution, but rather the non- (or only slightly) reflected handing down of strategies of artistic production developed under concrete historical frameworks.12 For this reason, according to Owens, it could not only be about validating oppositional, critical forms of practice of the 196os and 197os in the (then) present: "The attempt to emulate or reconstitute such practices at this moment histor-ically, rather than thinking how radical, critical practice might be formed out of contemporary social relations, both artistic and social, seems to me to miss the boat."13 Owens therefore argued for the necessity to adopt the "mediating positions" articulated by Ernest Mandel in Late Capitalism (1975) that occur through continual expansion of the apparatus, in order to employ the entire production apparatus whereby Owens' version has less to do with Louis Althusser's "infernal machine" or Benjamin H. D. Buchloh's declining paradigm "frame proper to art itself" than a field structured by internal and external social relations. It seems reasonable to read the performance "Damaged Goods" Gallery Talk Starts Here (1986) by Andrea Fraser, who studied under Owens in New York at the School of Visual Arts and the Whitney Independent Studies Program, as an anticipatory response to a call articulated in "From Work to Frame" for a revision of critical practice in the field of art-which additionally queries which form of authorship is viable after "the death of the author". 

In an evaluation of Haacke's more recent New Museum survey, art historian James Meyer considers contemporary forms of practice that have been informed by institutional critique: "Perhaps the real story of institutional critique at present is its migration from the aesthetic to the non-aesthetic sphere-the protests and boycotts by artists and museum employees in response to the perceived inequities and hypocrisies of institutions that present themselves as serving the public interest. Whether the current activism will instigate a 'new' institutional critique-an art that transforms information into aesthetic form and experience-remains to be seen." With Owens, it could be added that already this differentiation between activism and institutional critique is a mediated one, subject to conditions of speech or expression that are historically variable. In order to approach the potentials of the aesthetic, according to Owens, the position, activity, and function of discourse-producers should also be considered-and how they represent art and its surrounding frameworks, which might occasionally exclude activism, in their textual production: "Now, what interests me is the critic's relationship to how the work of art is represented within his or her text. [...] It's a relationship that is entangled with a certain kind of appropriation and reduction of the work. [...] Well, then, how does one represent the work within one's own text?"

"From Work to Frame" was first published in English and Swedish in 1987 in a catalog of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm for the exhibition "Implosion: A Postmodern Perspective" (October 24, 1987-January 10, 1988) without any accompanying illustrations. Today the text is most often quoted from the collection of writings Craig Owens. Beyond Recognition:

Representation, Power and Culture, published posthumously in 1992 by Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock, featuring illustrations of works by Asher, Broodthaers, Buren, and Gerhard Richter.l8 Surprisingly, "From Work to Frame" is not included in the full bibliography listed in the collection, which may have had something to do with 1985 being attributed in some contexts as the date of its first publication. However, there is no evidence that the text was printed already at that time. The quotes Owens cites from texts out of the year 1986 contradict the earlier dating, as well as the curator of "Implosion," Lars Nittve, who has stated that he commissioned the essay in the spring of 1987.19

The focus of Owens' essay is how artistic production finds its conditions for success within a social universe, and therefore is an acknowledgement of conditions related to production and reception while incorporating an understanding of how authorship in artistic work can be realized. The shift goes, as the title announces, from the work to the frame, and at the same time to a determination of those conditions that make works appear as frames. A 2009 anthology published by MIT Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists' Writings posits "From Work to Frame" alongside selected texts by Buchloh, Douglas Crimp, and Rosalyn Deutsche as central to the establishment of a discourse which continues to inform critical writings and artistic practices that diverge from the traditional studio model.20 In the past, the text influenced debates about the status of the artistic subject and the interplay of authorship and economy, the differentiation— especially complex in a posthumous context—of the "artist-function" and the "author-function," and contemplations that emerge out of the texture of texts and paratexts in the field of art." Moreover, Owens' essay, with its citations of writings by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michael Foucault, is a prime example of the manifestation of "French Theory" within a North American context. 

Alongside its first German translation, the English version of the text published here includes supplements and minor corrections to the original 1987 and 1992 reprint's dates, page numbers, and literature references. Additionally, the wording of quotations and a few sentences have been minimally revised.

Many thanks to Lars Nittve for providing information about the essay's commission, to the employees of the Study Center of the Generali Foundation in Salzburg for research assistance, and a very special thanks to Lynne Tillman for permissions and support. 

FROM WORK TO FRAME, OR, IS THERE LIFE AFTER

"THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR"?

CRAIG OWENS

Towards the end of his career, Robert Smithson-who, in an attempt to regain control over his own production had removed his practice from the urban centers to the abandoned slag heaps and strip mines of an „infernal" postindustrial landscape-expressed new or renewed interest in the value-producing mechanisms of the art world: "Paintings are bought and sold," he told an interviewer in 1972. "The artist sits in his solitude, knocks out his paint-ings, assembles them, then waits for someone to confer the value, some external source. The artist isn't in control of his value. l..

And that's the way it operates." As if predicting the fallout from the following year's auction of the Robert Scull collection-which would prompt some angry words from Rauschenberg about the "profiteering of dealers and collectors" (his Double Feature (I959), for which Scull had paid $2,500, was auctioned for $90,000)-Smithson continued: "Whatever a painting goes for at Parke Bernet is really somebody else's decision, not the artist's decision, so there's a division, on the broad social realm, the value is separated from the artist, the artist is estranged from his own production." Having thus contradicted a deeply entrenched, distinctly modern view of artistic labor as non-alienated labor, Smithson predicted that artists would become increasingly involved in an analysis of the forces and relations of artistic production: "This is the great issue, I think it will be the growing issue, of the seventies: the investigation of the apparatus the artist is threaded through."! 

The investigation of the apparatus the artist is threaded through indeed turned out—in the practices of Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Michael Asher, Hans Haacke, and Louise Lawler, as well as writings by such artists as Martha Rosler, Mary Kelly, and Allan Sekula (among others) —to be the main preoccupation of art in the '7os.? My purpose in citing Smithson's remark is not, however, to confirm his prescience or precedence; in fact, he came to this conclusion rather late, certainly after Broodthaers and Buren, and possibly through contact with their works. Rather, Smithson's remark interests me because it directly links the investigation of the apparatus the artist is threaded through to the widespread crisis of artistic authorship that swept the cultural institutions of the West in the mid-196os— a crisis which took its name from the title of Roland Barthes's famous 1967 postmortem "The Death of the Author." If, as Barthes argued, the author could not—or could no longer-claim to be the unique source of the meaning and/or value of the work of art, then who—or what-could make such a claim? It is my contention that, despite its diversity, the art of the last twenty years, the art frequently referred to as "postmod-ernist," can perhaps best be understood as a response or series of responses to this question-even when artists simply attempt to reclaim the privileges that have traditionally accrued to the author in our society.?

Much of the art produced during the last two decades has been concerned simply to register the disappearance of the figure of the author. In this regard, one might cite the practices of Giulio Paolini and Gerhard Richter, both of which stage this event, but in significantly different ways. In Paolini the author figures as a kind of magician who performs a disappearing act (and not the alchemical tours de force of other arte povera artist-magicians); this is the significance of the formally dressed, top-hatted character who (dis-)appears in recent drawings and installations. As often as not, this figure is partially concealed: for Paolini, the work of art functions primarily as a screen or mask for its producer. (In Hi-Fi

1965), broad gestural brushstrokes-the modernist sign for the artist's "presence" —cover not only the canvas, but also the cutout figure of the painter standing before it, who is thereby camouflaged.

And in Delfo (also 1965), a life-size photographic self-portrait, the artist is masked by sun-glasses and further concealed behind the horizontal and vertical bars of a stretcher.) For a series of 1968

"Self-Portraits" Paolini appropriated self-portraits by Nicolas Poussin and the Douanier Rousseau, suggesting that authorship is an assumed identity, achieved only through a complex series of historical identifications: "The point," Paolini maintained, "was to subtract my own identity and to assume instead an elective, historical and hypothetical one." And at the 1970 "Biennale della giovane pittura" in Bologna, Paolini exhibited an untitled 1917 Picabia collage, thereby appropriating not another artist's (self-) image, but an entire work.

If Paolini registers the disappearance of the author in individual projects, Richter does so at the level of his practice. Viewed individually, Richter's works remain as internally consistent and compositionally resolved as any produced under an authorizing signature; it is, rather, as he moves from photographically derived "realism" (landscape, portraiture, or still life) to abstraction (monochromatic, systemic, or gestural) and back again that Richter effectively refuses the principles of conceptual coherence and stylistic uniformity according to which we have been taught to recognize the "presence" of an author in his work. As Michel Foucault wrote in a 1969 essay, "What Is an Author?," one of the functions of the figure of the author is to "neutralize the contradictions that are found in a series of texts. Governing this function is a belief that there must beat a particular level of an author's thought, of his conscious or unconscious desire—a point where contradictions are resolved, where the incompatible elements can be shown to relate to one another or to cohere around a fundamental and originating contradiction." Criticism has been demonstrably uncomfortable with Richter's shiftiness and has therefore attempted to locate precisely such an originary contradiction governing his production-characteristically, the tension between painting and photography; however, this argument reveals less about the artist's desire, and more about the critic's desire for a coherent subject backing up—authorizing —works of art.

In this respect, Richter's practice can be compared with that of Cindy Sherman, who "implicitly attack[s] auteurism by equating the known artifice of the actress in front of the camera with the supposed authenticity of the director behind it." Until recently, Sherman appeared in all of her own photographs, but always as a different character; the shifts of identity that constitute the sense of her work are legible, however, only at the level of the series. To exhibit one Cindy Sherman photograph makes no sense, although her work is often exhibited in this way. If Sherman's practice is reminiscent of Richter's, Sherrie Levine's

"appropriations" from the late "7os and early '8os—in which she re-photographed images by such photographers as Edward Weston and Walker Evans, or exhibited fine-art reproductions of paintings by Franz Marc, say, or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner-recall Paolini's appropriation of Picabia. Indeed, Levine's Self-Portrait, after Egon Schiele, produced for documenta 7 (1982), seems directly related to Paolini's "self-portraits." However, as the gender-shift in Levine's self-portrait demonstrates, to reduce her questioning of the ownership of the image to Paolini's investigation of authorial identity (or Sherman's investigation of authorial identity to Richter's stylistic heterogeneity) is to ignore sexual difference. As Barthes observed, the privileges reserved for the author in our society are distinctly masculine prerogatives; the relation of an artist to his work is that of a father to his children.® To produce an illegitimate work, one which lacks the inscription of the Father (the Law), can be a distinctly feminist gesture; and it is not surprising that Sherman's and Levine's works lack the melancholy with which Richter and especially Paolini register the disappearance of the figure of the author.

It is obviously insufficient to repeat empty slogans: the author has disappeared; God and man died a common death. Rather, we should reexamine the empty space left by the author's disappearance; we should attentively examine, along its gaps and fault lines, its new demarcations, and the reapportionment of this void; we should await the fluid functions released by this disappearance.

— Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?"

Although the author is a distinctly modern figure, his death is not a postmodern "event." Barthes himself traced it to Stéphane Mallarmé-to which we might add Marcel Duchamp's courting of chance, or the surrealists' flirtation with collaborative production techniques. Moreover, both of the candidates Barthes nominated to occupy the empty space left by the author's disappearance are recognizably modernist. Barthes's first proposal was that it is the reader or viewer who is responsible for the meaning of the work ("A text's unity," he wrote, "lies not in its origin but in its desti-nation"); his second, that it is language itself, that is, the codes and conventions of literary or artistic production, that produces the work ("It is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality [...] to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs, and not 'me'')? A great deal of modernist practice did ignore or repress the role of the viewers in constituting a work; and modernist artists frequently celebrated the utter conventionality of the work of art as (a sign of) its absolute originality.1º Although much recent art and criticism has investigated the production of viewers by and for works of art, and while a recognition of the conventionality of works of art, their regularity or conformity with institutional specifications, is also a characteristic of cultural production today, nevertheless, neither of Barthes's proposals is sufficient cause to posit a definitive break with modernist practice. Quite the reverse; as Foucault observed,

"The themes destined to replace the privileged position accorded the author have merely served to arrest the possibility of genuine change."

Rather, postmodernism approaches the empty space left by the author's disappearance from a different perspective, one which brings to light a number of questions that modernism, with its exclusive focus on the work of art and its "creator," either ignored or repressed: Where do exchanges between readers and viewers take place? Who is free to define, manipulate and, ultimately, to benefit from the codes and conventions of cultural production?

These questions shift attention away from the work and its producer and onto its frame—the first, by focusing on the location in which the work of art is encountered; the second, by insisting on the social nature of artistic production and reception. Sometimes the postmodernist work insists upon the impossibility of framing, of ever rigorously distinguishing a text from its con-text (this argument is made repeatedly in Jacques Derrida's writings on visual art);12 at others, it is all frame (Allan McCollum's plaster painting "surrogates"). More often than not, however, the "frame" is treated as that network of institutional practices (Foucault would have called them "discourses") that define, circumscribe and contain both artistic production and reception. Marcel Broodthaers's "Musée d'Art Moderne-Département des Aigles"—an imaginary museum the artist founded in 1968, and which would preoccupy him until 1972—is one of the earliest instances of the postmodern displacement from work to frame.

For the inaugural exhibition, the rooms of Broodthaers's house in Brussels were filled with packing crates (the kind customarily used to transport works of art) upon which the words "picture,"

"with care,” "top," and "bottom" had been stencilled. (The works of art themselves were represented by post-card reproductions of paintings by Jacques-Louis David, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Gustave Courbet, etc.) During the opening and closing "ceremonies," a van belonging to an art shipper was parked outside in the street; the opening also included a discussion of the social responsibilities of the artist. As a "real" museum curator (Michael Compton of the Tate) observed, Broodthaers thus presented "the shell of an exhibition, without the normal substance.

"13 This remark reminds us of the empty egg

and mussel shells— the latter, an ironic reference to the artist's Belgian origins—used in so many of his works. Broodthaers's preoccupation with the shell, and not the kernel-the container and not the contained —not only overturns a longstanding philosophical prejudice that meaning and value are intrinsic properties of objects; it also stands as an acknowledgment of the role of the container in determining the shape of what it contains.

It is customary to attribute recognition of the importance of the frame in constituting the work of art to Duchamp (the readymade requires its institutional setting in order to be perceived as a work of art), and to regard the investigation of the apparatus the artist is threaded through which took place in the 197os as a revival of the productivist line elaborated in the '2os and '3os, specifically, of the demand (to paraphrase Walter Benjamin) that artists refuse to supply the existing productive apparatus without attempting to change it. I am arguing, however, that "the death of the author" constitutes a historical watershed between the avant-gardes of the ios and 20s and the institutional critiques of the "7os, and that to regard the latter as a revival or renewal of the former can only lead to misapprehensions about contemporary practice. Broodthaers's shift from the role of artist to that of director of a (fictitious) museum is a case in point. In a 1972 manifestation of the "Musée d'Art Moderne-Département des Aigles" some 3o0 images of eagles from different historical periods were exhibited, each with a label declaring "This is not a work of art;" Broodthaers thereby acknowledged Duchamp's readymade strategy, but interrupted it with a Magrittian declaration of non-identity. And in an interview published in the catalogue of a 1973 retrospective in Brussels, he observed that the questioning of art and its means of circulation can merely "; justify the continuity and the expansion of [artistic] production," adding, "There remains art as production, as production." 

This enigmatic remark can perhaps be illuminated by looking at Broodthaers's final projects, in which vanguard practice becomes the subject of another, second-level practice. In these, Broodthaers addressed the military metaphor that sustained avant-garde practice what he referred to as "the conquest of space." His final book a miniature (4 by 2.5 cms) atlas published in 1975 and titled The Conquest of Space: Atlas for the use of artists and military men— explicitly linked military and artistic maneuvers, suggesting that artistic production is ultimately contained within the boundaries of the nation-state (French art, German art, etc.).

(As early as 1964-65, Broodthaers had addressed the figure of the artist-soldier with his Fémur d'homme belge, a human thigh bone painted the colors of the Belgian flag; speaking about this work, Broodthaers told an interviewer, "Nationality and anatomy were reunited. The soldier is not far off.")15 Broodthaers's final installation, Décor, a conquest (1975), a parodistic reconstruction of the Battle of Waterloo (which was fought by two imperial powers, England and France, on Belgian soil), traced the historical emergence of the avant-garde to the Napoleonic era, with its ideology of global conquest and domination. Here, Broodthaers questioned the avant-garde's claim to oppose bourgeois society and its values; in these works avant-garde culture stands revealed as the official culture of Imperialism.

More recently, Barbara Kruger has addressed the vanguard figure of the artist-soldier, but from a distinctly feminist per-spective. In Great Balls of Fire! an "insert" published earlier this year in the Swiss magazine Parkett, she reproduced some of the more egregiously militaristic—and celebratorily phallo-centric— passages from the manifestoes of the avant-garde, its declarations of war on bourgeois society. Thus, Kruger focused attention on its individualistic, heroic, and, above all, masculine model of artistic subjectivity. (Predictably, Marinetti comes off worse: "We will glorify war—the only true hygiene of the world —militarism, patriotism, the last projects were addressed to the military destructive gesture of anarchist, the beautiful Ideas which kill, and the scorn of women.")16 Kruger's project reads in conjunction with her recent bill-board (seen throughout the United Kingdom, as well as in California, Chicago, and Las Vegas), which declares "We Don't Need Another Hero," thereby linking escalating nationalism and militarism in the "real" world (the global popularity of the film Rambo; the North American public's reception of Oliver North as a "patriot") with the continuing search for artist-soldier-heroes in the "art world."

Art whatever it may be is exclusively political. What is called for is the analysis of formal and cultural limits (and not one or the other) within which art exists and struggles.

These limits are many and of different intensities.

Although the prevailing ideology and the associated artists try in every way to camouflage them, and although it is too early-the conditions are not met—to blow them up, the time has come to unveil them.

— Daniel Buren, "Critical Limits"

The historical avant-gardes were explosive, expansive, trans-gressive; every boundary was a frontier to be crossed, a barrier to be shattered, an interdiction to be broken. Hence, their demand for the destruction of the frame: as Peter Bürger argues in his 1974 essay Theory of the Avant-Garde—in which he too advocates a displacement of critical attention away from individual works of art and onto their institutional frames-the historical avant-gardes called for the dissolution of art as an institution (meaning its constitution as a separate sphere of activity, its autonomy) and the reintegration of artistic into social practice.! By the end of the 196os, however, it had become apparent that this demand had, at best, been premature, and that, at worst, avant-garde practice had all too easily been contained.

The cultural politics of the late 6os was a politics of cultural containment. "Containment" was also the key term in U.S. policy in Southeast Asia, and this use of the term could not have been far from Smithson's mind when he wrote the following explanation for his withdrawal from documenta 5 (1972): "Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits [...] Some artists imagine they've got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them. As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out of their control [...] Museums, like asylums and jails, have wards and cells—in other words, neutral rooms called 'galleries.' [...] Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of esthetic convalescence."& In removing his practice to the postindustrial landscape, Smithson was, of course, attempting to circumvent the frame; but he also confronted the problem of cultural confinement in his "Non-Sites," which set up a dialectical relationship between the gallery and a place outside it. Insofar as they are merely containers-metal bins filled with rocks or sand from specific sites—the "Non-Sites" also function as mirrors which reflect their own containment.

Daniel Buren approached the problem of cultural confinement some-what differently, situating some of his works partially within and partially beyond the frame. Within and Beyond the Frame, was, in fact, the title of a 1973 installation at the John Weber Gallery in New York; a series of striped banners strung down the middle of the gallery extended out the window and across West Broadway. Similarly, the "missing parts" of a 1975 installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York-the (imaginary) sections of Buren's work "concealed" by a staircase were posted on billboards in SoHo, thereby reminding viewers that these two parts of the city were already connected by the art economy. In these projects, Buren turned the tables: instead of being contained by the museum, his work contained the museum.19 Buren's "trans-gressions" of the frame were engineered to call attention, not to themselves, but to the frame; as such they lacked the destructive impulse-and impulsiveness-of the modernist avant-garde. As he wrote in his 1970 essay "Standpoints," "All the pseudo-revolu-tionary myth, and what it continues to influence, was/is possible only because one's attention has been fixed only on the object shown, its meaning, without looking at or discussing even once the place where it is shown."20

For Buren, "the Museum/Gallery, for lack of being taken into consideration, is the framework, the habit [..] the inescapable

"support' on which art history is 'painted' (38). Just as the canvas conceals its stretcher, and the image its support (as early as 1966, Broodthaers made a similar observation: "Even in a transparent painting the color still hides the canvas and the moulding hides the frame"),21 so, too, for Buren, the function of the work of art—any work of art—is to conceal the multiple frames within which it is contained: "This is what the dominant ideology wants," he wrote, "that what is contained should provide, very subtly, a screen for the container" (38). Hence Buren's decision to paste his own deliberately anonymous or impersonal work-"vertically striped sheets of paper, the bands of which are 8.7 cms. wide -directly onto the walls of the museum or gallery, thereby literalizing the function of the work.

Buren's positioning of his work in relation to the institutional frame constitutes a critique of attempts to regain artistic freedom by working outside it—as if works placed outside the walls of a gallery or museum are not subject to external constraints. "A clear eye will recognize what is meant by freedom in art," he wrote,

"but an eye which is a little less educated will see better what it is all about when it has adopted the following idea: that the location (outside or inside) where a work is seen is its frame/its boundary" (28-29). In this regard, Buren's critique of Smithson's exoticism is illuminating. A work of art, Buren contends, can be "shown outside the usual places of exhibition," including "the walls of the city, of a subway, a highway, any urban place or any place where some kind of social life exists" (indeed, in the mid-'6os, Buren placed his own work in such situations). However, this list of possible sites for works of art "excludes the oceans, the deserts, the Himalayas, the Great Salt Lake, virgin forests, and other exotic places-all invitations for artistic safaris" (50-51). For Buren, the "return to nature" is an escapist maneuver, an attempt not to confront, but merely to circumvent, the institutional frame: "As soon as frames, limits, are perceived as such, in art, one rushes for ways to bypass them. In order to do this, one takes off for the country, maybe even for the desert, to set up one's easel" (48).

For Buren, the "unveiling" of the institutional frame can take place only within the frame, and not from some imaginary vantage point outside it. (As Jacques Derrida has written of his own critical practice, which also attends to the invisible frames/borders/limits of the philosophical or literary text: "The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures.")22 Nevertheless, the deconstructive artist does not occupy the position traditionally reserved for the artist within that structure. As Buren writes, "He carries on his activity within a particular milieu, known as the artistic milieu, but he does so not as an artist, but as an individual." This distinction is crucial, Buren contends, "because particularly at this time [1967], the artist is hailed as art's greatest glory; it is time for him to step down from this role he has been cast in or too willingly played, so that the work' itself may become visible, no longer blurred by the myth of the 'creator,' a man 'above the run of the mill'' (25).

The deconstructive work must therefore be neutral, impersonal, anonymous (these terms are Buren's). An anonymous work is not simply one whose author's identity is unknown; rather, it is one that cannot be appropriated. "The producer of an anonymous work must take full responsibility for it," Buren contends, "but his relation to the work is totally different from the artist's to his work of art. Firstly, he is no longer the owner of the work in the old sense".. Here, Buren contradicts the legal definition of the author as proprietor. As soon as an artist signs a work, thereby claiming it as his, it becomes private property, a commodity which the artist is legally entitled to exchange. By contrast, the anonymous work is not subject to the effects of appropriation entailed by the signature:

"It is not his [the artist's] work, but a work [...] This work being considered as common property, there can be no question of claiming the authorship thereof, possessively, in the sense that there are authentic paintings by Courbet and valueless forgeries" (19).

Similarly, Hans Haacke is interested, not in the properties of the work of art, but in the work of art as property. In two different projects from the early '7os (Manet-PROJEKT'74 (1974) and Seurat's "Les Poseuses" [small version], 1888-1975 1975)) he traced the provenance of a 19th-century painting, focusing on "the social and economic position of the persons who have owned the painting over the years and the prices paid for it."3 To this day Haacke continues to draw parallels between cultural and economic or political influence. Der Pralinenmeister 1981) focuses on the business practices of German art "patron" Peter Ludwig; Taking Stock (unfinished) (1983-84) deals with the Thatcher connection of British collectors Charles and Doris Saatchi). However, the focus of his practice has gradually shifted away from the private appropriation of works of art: "If such collectors," Haacke writes,

"seem to be acting primarily in their own self-interest and to be building pyramids to themselves when they attempt to impose their will on 'chosen' institutions, their moves are in fact less troublesome in the long run than the disconcerting arrival on the scene of corporate funding for the arts— even though the latter appears at first to be more innocuous.

Since 1975 Haacke has been primarily concerned with exposing cracks in the anonymous, impersonal facade of corporate funding (Mobil, Chase, Allied Chemical, British Leyland, Philips, American Cyanamid, Alcan, Oerlikon-Bührle-not to mention Tiffany and Cartier). MetroMobiltan (1985), for exam-ple, is a mock-up of the entablature of New York's Metropolitan Museum, complete with inscription: "Many public relations opportunities are available through the sponsorship of programs, special exhibitions and services. These can often provide a creative and cost-effective answer to a specific marketing objective, particularly where international, governmental or consumer relations may be a fundamental concern.-The Metropolitan Museum of Art." Directly beneath this inscription hangs a banner advertising the exhibition "Treasures of Ancient Nigeria" and its corporate sponsor, Mobil, flanked by two others on which are inscribed quotations from the company's statements defending its sales to the government of South Africa: "Mobil's management in New York believes that its South African subsidiaries' sales to the police and military are but a small part of its total sales ..." and "Total denial of supplies to the police and military forces of a host country is hardly consistent with an image of responsible citizenship in that country." These banners hang in front of, and only partially conceal, a photograph which indicates what the benevolent facade of cultural patronage is intended to conceal: a funeral procession for black victims shot by the South African police at Crossroads, near Cape Town, on March 16, 1985.

Michael Asher also deals literally with the museum's facade.

In 1979 he removed some of the exterior aluminum cladding from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, exhibiting it inside the gallery as (minimal) sculpture. The same year he replaced a bronze statue of George Washington from the entrance of the Art Institute of Chicago to the museum's 18th-century rooms. (Of the latter project, Asher wrote: "My use of the sculpture was not an authorial usage, but one intended to disengage it from its former appropriation."

"6) In both projects, the public function of (elements

of) the museum's public facade (at the MCA, the "symbolic expression of the museum's expansion and future growth" (198); at the Art Institute, the "conveying [of] a sense of national heritage in historical and aesthetic terms" (208)) was undermined. Writing of his project at the MCA, Asher observed: "I attempted to literally deconstruct the elements of the facade, thereby changing their meaning by negating both their architectural and sculptural readings, which the building had originally attempted to fuse. I contextualized the sculpture to display the architecture and the architecture to display the problems of sculpture" (198).

Asher's literally deconstructive practice proceeds through displacement: elements are either moved or removed from their "original" contexts so that their contradictions can be exam-ined.? Asher works only with the spatial and temporal givens of a situation, rarely adding anything to them, often subtracting something from them; he refers to this procedure as "material withdrawal"— "marking by disclosure, rather than by constructing figure-ground relationships" (89). Writing about a 1973 exhibition in Milan, in which the walls of the gallery were sandblasted, removing several accumulated layers of white paint to expose the brown plaster underneath, he commented: "At the Toselli Gallery, I used a procedural approach, attempting to materially withdraw an author's sign and responsibility. Usually an artist's sign, as an addition to a given architectural space and a discrete, visually identifiable element, guides and restricts viewer awareness and shifts it from the problems inherent in the gallery space and the work to an arbitrarily formalized insert" (92; italics added). And in 1974 at the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles, Asher removed the wall separating the exhibition space from the office, thereby exposing to public scrutiny the dealer's activities. "The function of the work at the Claire Copley Gallery was didactic," Asher writes, "to represent materially the visible aspects of [the] process of abstraction" (96). (By "abstraction" Asher refers to the process through which a work's use value becomes exchange value.) For Asher, this process of commodification is not accidental; it is, rather, a crucial part of the reception of a work of art as such.

Asher: "The only way for a work to be fully received is through its initial abstraction for exchange value" (100).

In preparation for a 1977 exhibition at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Asher had the translucent glass ceiling panels removed from half of the museum's galleries; the exhibition consisted of the replacement of these panels by the museum's work crew. Simultaneously, the other half of the museum contained an exhibition of works from the permanent collection selected by the museum's director. Thus, activity which is usually completed before an exhibition opens to the public was exposed to public view; the processual aspect of Asher's installation could not have contrasted more sharply with the static quality of the more traditional installation that accompanied it. However, the most

"radical" aspect of this project was its acknowledgment that the artist is only one of a number of functions necessary for the production of a work of art: "By clearly distinguishing and specifically presenting the different participants (work crew, curator, artist) that make an exhibition possible at such an institution, I wanted to show how these necessary but separate functions are equally essential for the constitution of a work" (178). In emphasizing these "separate but equal" functions, Asher was acknowledging the collective nature of artistic production.

To argue that artistic production is collective production is not to encourage artists to collaborate with other artists; rather, it is to defetishize the work of art.28 As Haacke has written: "I believe the use of the term 'industry' for the entire range of activities of those who are employed or working on a freelance basis in the art field has a salutary effect. With one stroke that term cuts through the romantic clouds that envelop the often misleading and mythical notions widely held about the production, distribution, and consumption of art. Artists, as much as galleries, museums, and journalists (not excluding art historians), hesitate to discuss the industrial aspect of their activities. An unequivocal acknowledgment might endanger the cherished romantic ideas with which most art world participants enter the field, and which still sustain them emotionally today.

This statement of the collective or "industrial" nature of artistic production is especially interesting in light of Haacke's emphasis on the relationship between capital and the art world.

The recent penetration of international investment capital into the art world has resulted in an unprecedented expansion of the art apparatus. As the apparatus expands, so do the number and variety of activities necessary to the production, exhibition, and reception of works of art—art handlers, preparators, artists' representatives, publicists, consultants, accountants, administrators, etc. This multiplication and diversification of "intermediate functions"30

-intermediate, because they exist in the gap between, or the nonsimultaneity of, production and reception-further alienates artists from their own production; as these functions multiply they increase both the spatial and temporal distance between artist and their "publics." At the same time, however, the expansion of the apparatus continually generates new positions from which artists can produce critical work.

At least this is what is suggested by the practice of Louise Lawler, who has occupied practically every position within the apparatus except that customarily reserved for the "artist." Thus, instead of contributing information about her work to the catalogue of a 1978 group exhibition at Artists Space in New York (in which she exhibited a painting of a race horse borrowed from Aqueduct), Lawler designed a logo for the gallery which appeared on the catalogue's cover, thereby presenting, rather than being presented by, the institution.31 (This reversal of presentational positions is reminiscent of Buren's reversal of the relationship of container and contained.) At the entrance to her first one-person show in New York (1982), Lawler presented an "Arrangement of Pictures" by gallery artists; in the back room she exhibited a series of photographs documenting the activities of other picture

"arrangers" (museum curators, corporate art consultants, collec-tors). In Lawler's photographs of domestic interiors, works of art appear as one luxury good among others; in her photographs of corporate headquarters, they are, as often as not, simply pieces of office equipment. Thus, Lawler produced work from the position of an installation photographer, just as, for the New Museum's 1984 anthology of critical writings Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, she worked as photo-editor. However, Lawler's contribution does not simply illustrate the text; rather, it reads as a critical commentary upon it.

As soon as the legitimation crisis of the institutions that contain the discourse of visual culture seemed to be overcome—not by a resolution of their increasingly apparent contradictions and conflicts of interest, of course, but by a rigid sociopolitical reconstitution of traditional hierarchies and the aesthetic myths that adorn them—, the radical practice of artists of Asher's generation could be marginalized to the extent that the work was made to appear historical before it had even properly entered the culture.

— Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Michael Asher: Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979

In 1982 Jenny Holzer commented that, by the late '

7os, the investigation of the apparatus the artist is threaded through seemed to be finished: "As far as the systematic exploration of context is concerned, at that time [ca. 1977] that point had been made"32 and indeed, the developments I have outlined above will undoubtedly appear to many readers as "ancient history." If I insist on these devel-opments, it is for two reasons. First, I want to counter attempts like Holzer's to contain the investigation of the forces and relations of artistic production within a particular historical time-frame. More importantly, I want to suggest that the post-modern displacement from work to frame lays the groundwork for a materialist cultural practice-one which, to borrow Lucio Colletti's definition of materialist political practice, "subverts and subordinates to itself the conditions from which it stems."33 For a recognition of the de facto social nature of artistic activity is essential if we ourselves are to employ, rather than simply being employed by, the apparatus we all-"lookers, buyers, dealers, makers"34 —are threaded through.