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These are not, to put it mildly, the conditions that govern what passes for advanced art today, especially in New York. The Avant-Garde Festival, held this fall on a boat moored at the South Street Seaport in Manhattan, was a fair example of the problem: a confusion of irresolute trivia, ranging from a cabin full of autumn leaves (which, at least, the kids enjoyed throwing around), through numerous video pieces, to Charlotte Moorman—who enjoys a fame of sorts as the world's only topless cellist—playing her instrument under water. It was all so affably amateurish, like a transistorized rummage sale, that one gave up expectation.
A besetting problem for experimenters is that people no longer expect to get their necessary information from art; it was this gap that the artist-made video tape promised to close. But an event does not automatically gain aesthetic meaning because it is recorded, handheld, on half-inch tape. Too many video pieces are either bald documentaries or hermetic diaries. Watching a tape of some artist making funny faces at himself has as many longueurs as gazing into the painted eye of a Landseer spaniel.
The inherent purposelessness of anti-object art becomes a real liability in one area: conceptualism. The basic claim of conceptual art is that making objects is irrelevant. The artist's duty is to reveal and criticize the attitudes by which art is made. In fact, painting and sculpture have always done this; every authentic creation is also a criticism, but criticism is not its sole subject. Instead, as Art Critic Max Kozloff pointed out in a trenchant essay on art-as-idea, we get "deliberately undigested accretions of data, documentations without comment, the purveying of information for its own sake, and the measuring of meaningless quantities."
And so a thicket of verbiage protects, and supports, the most banal propositions. Recently, an artist named Jannis Kounellis showed (among other things) a live macaw, sitting on a perch that projected from a steel plate. "The parrot piece," Kounellis explained, "is a more direct demonstration of the dialectic between the structure and the rest, in other words, the nature of the parrot, do you see? The structure represents a common mentality, and then the sensuous part, the parrot, is a criticism of the structure, right?" Stripped of its jargon, this is a not very surprising revelation that parrots are not perches. But at least one could scratch the parrot, which is not the case with more conceptualized works like Mel Bochner's recent piece at the Sonnabend Gallery: The Seven Properties of Between, 1971-72. It consisted of leaves of paper on which were laid stones, labeled A, B, X and Y, with such observations written below as "If X is between A and B, A and B are not identical." What, one wonders, are such minimalities doing in an art gallery rather than a child's primer of logic? Gallery space is not, in fact, necessary: one of Robert Barry's conceptual efforts required that the door of his gallery be locked and adorned with this notice: "For the exhibition, the gallery will be closed."