Anywhere or Not At All. Peter Osborne

in so far as it is a fragment. In short, philosophically, the fragment is the work of art. This is the origin of the modern conception of the non-organic work, and the sense in which modern art, contra classicism, is romantic – unless it is reactively neo-classical, that is, but that is another story. In fact, one might say that the developmental structures of both modern art and philosophy after Hegel take the form of dialectics of romanticizations and reactive neo-classicisms (returns to order).⁵²

      That this notion of the fragment is indeed a philosophical concept rather than a merely literary one is attested by Schlegel’s reference to its ideality.

      … as yet no genre exists that is fragmentary both in form and content, simultaneously completely subjective and individual [this is what separates it off from other fragments – PO], and completely objective and like a necessary part in a system of all the sciences. [AF 77]

      The fragment is an ideal form.

      What does this have to do with LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art? LeWitt certainly did not write ‘fragments’ in any self-conscious literary or philosophical sense; or conceive his three-dimensional works and projects in such terms. In terms of his literary production, he wrote, first, ‘paragraphs’ and then, a year or so later, ‘sentences’: paragraphs and sentences ‘on’ conceptual art. In doing so, he was probably more influenced formally by some of Ad Reinhardt’s writings from the late 1950s than by anything else; such as the 1957 ‘Twelve Rules for a New Academy’ or the 1958 ‘25 Lines of Words on Art’.⁵³ Nonetheless, these literal grammatical designations – paragraphs, sentences – clearly involve a certain literary formalism, quite distinct from the logical and performative uses of grammatical forms by artists like Weiner, Kosuth, early John Baldessari or Mel Ramsden.

      Weiner’s 1968 ‘Statements’ (reprinted in the same first issue of Art–Language as LeWitt’s Sentences) have an awkward declarative, aphoristic independence and sculptural intent that allowed them to be displayed independently, in a variety of graphical forms, transposed onto walls in a range of public sites, allying them, belatedly, with the Pop-typographic aspect of the early Kosuth, and making them, retrospectively (after Jenny Holzer) into obscure truisms. Early works by Baldessari and Ramsden depend upon context and materials – painting – for the jokey critical effects of their linguistic propositions. While Kosuth’s analogical conception of the propositional status of art – ‘art as idea as idea’ – had a more ambiguous relation to linguistic expression. In Kosuth, language offers a logical model – the analytical proposition; the art need not be actually ‘made’ of language as such.

      Indeed, for all the numerical formalism of his works, and the subtle literary formalism of his main critical statements – and I am suggesting a parallel here between those two formalisms – LeWitt was famously polemically against ‘the logical’ and the ‘rational’ forms (words he tended to use as synonyms) seemingly embraced by other practicioners of a conceptual art. LeWitt identified the conceptual with the ‘mental’, rather than the logical: ‘Conceptual, not logical – the mind is used to infer’, we read in the ‘Notes’.⁵⁴ And, of course, he famously wrote in Sentences:

      1. Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.

      Artists are very fond of this sentence. This ‘mystical’ aspect is one clue to the depth at which one can make a claim for the status of Sentences as fragments; to its being, one might say, ‘fragmentary both in form and content, simultaneously completely subjective and individual, and completely objective’. But it is philosophically a rather more complicated ‘mysticism’ than some may care to know (as was that of the early Romantics). The way Sentences acquires this fragmentary status is by participating, equally, in the potentially infinite openness but actually finite closure of an exhibited part of a series. The way it does this is by reducing each sentence, formally, to a unit of ‘information’.

Information and Series

      The historical meaning of the concept of information appears most clearly in Benjamin’s 1936 essay ‘The Storyteller’, which recounts the epochal historical transition from an oral narrative tradition, directed towards transmitting the ‘epic side of truth’ – namely, wisdom’ – via the rise of the book form of the novel, to the ‘new form of communication’ of information. Information, associated with the newspaper, is understood to bring about ‘a crisis in the novel’. Information has two main features: prompt verifiability and ‘understandability in itself’, or semantic self-sufficiency. As Benjamin puts it: ‘The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time.’ This need to ‘sound plausible’ is understood to be incompatible with the ‘spirit’ of storytelling. Hence information marks the decline of narrative. However, this is not itself (as it is often taken to be) a narrative of decline:

      … nothing would be more fatuous than to see in it merely a ‘“symptom of decay”, let alone a “modern” symptom. It is, rather, only a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed narrative from living speech …⁵⁵

      This historical sequence, epic–novel–information (which then gets taken up into montage, in both literary and film forms), was replayed in condensed form at high speed in the curatorial history of conceptual art between spring 1969 and autumn 1970: in the series of exhibitions running from When Attitudes Become Form (Bern, spring 1969), subtitled ‘Works–Concepts–Processes–Situation–Information’ (information is fifth in an informational series), via the seminal show Information (Museum of Modern Art, New York, July 1970) – in which information becomes synonymous with the work of art – to Software: Information Technology – Its New Meaning as Art, (Jewish Museum, New York, autumn 1970), in which information is itself reduced to its latest technological medium. What is interesting about Sol LeWitt’s serialism is that it uses the semantic self-sufficiency of the unit of information – here, the sentence – as its material, but gives it new meaning by reconfiguring the relations between such units, in order to display the pure form of information itself, independently of any particular content, thereby giving the ‘major’ form a new ‘minor’ artistic use.⁵⁶ As LeWitt himself put it, in his description of his ‘Serial Project No. 1’, in Aspen 5–6 (1967):