This review doesn’t matter: the exhibition’s potential is confirmed by its existence rather than by its content. Conceptual art, after all, inherently bypasses criticism. Judging it is less interesting than following through on its ideas—ideas that reveal the invisible apron strings of the “real world’s” power structures. But don’t take my word for it. Take it from Lippard, the pioneering art historian whose words I have quoted, almost verbatim, in the preceding sentences.
Lippard was fundamental in establishing the free-for-all that is today’s mainstream art world—a milieu rife with woolly intellectualizing, political posturing, and (ahem) “aleatory strategies [that] de-center the authorial function and thus reevaluate the role of logical argumentation and hermeneutics as the guarantors of aesthetic function.” The exhibition takes its title from Lippard’s Six Years, a slim volume published in 1973 detailing the advent of Conceptualism. As such, “Materializing Six Years” ushers viewers back to the late 1960s, wherein sticking-it-to-the-man was the prevailing mantra. Within New York City’s headier art precincts, “the man” was the art critic Clement Greenberg and his “arrogant formalism.”
Art and Culture is the first thing viewers encounter upon entering the exhibition, but not, that is, Greenberg’s seminal book. Rather it’s a Cornellian objet trouvé, created by the British artist John Latham, which holds the book’s remains. Latham held a party wherein guests were invited to chew pages torn from Art and Culture; the resulting pulp was subsequently mixed with yeast in order to (wait