"Open Systems": Tate Modern

"Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970" was the latest installment in a string of exhibitions dealing with the '60s and '70s, many focused on Conceptual art: "L'Art conceptuel, une perspective" (Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1989); "1965-1975: Reconsidering the Object of Art" (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1995); "Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s" (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1999); and "Live in Your Head: Concept and Experiment in Britain, 1965-75" (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2000). The first two were monumental surveys. "Global Conceptualism" challenged the Western slant of previous definitions of the phenomenon, and "Live in Your Head" focused on the English context. True to its title, "Open Systems" was a more open-ended effort, cutting a broad swath through the multifarious practices loosely associated with historical Conceptualism. The exhibition's story goes something like this: 1. During the '60s, artists started to make works employing cubes and other simple polyhedrons. 2. These artists, unlike the hard-core Minimalists, infused geometry with allusion (to politics, to subjectivity, to natural processes, etc.). 3. The organization of these forms, often in serial sequences, suggested an apposite syntax for examining society and its "systems." 4. This synthesis of form and technique, of geometry and seriality, produced a new kind of installation, one that revealed the perceptual parameters of the white cube, as well as new kinds of performance. 5. Other artists, avoiding an overt politics, inflected repetition with "poetical" subject matter.

The show's narrative followed to a point. The installation opened with an impressive array of boxes, juxtaposing Untitled, 1963, Donald Judd's cadmium-red floor piece with its band of purple Plexiglas, one of the first exhibited examples of Minimalist work, with Hans Haacke's Condensation Cube, 1963-65, where the Plexiglas box has become a vitrine of precipitation responsive to the gallery temperature--a climatological-museological "system." The latter work pointed to Haacke's masterpiece Shapolsky et al...., 1971, a serial documentation of a "real-time social system" (the holdings of a Manhattan slumlord). Still other works--Andy Warhol's Brillo, 1964, Eva Hesse's Inside I, 1967, and Cildo Meireles's Geographical Mutations: Frontier Rio-Sao Paolo, 1969--suggested the semantic potential of the cube (as the Dwan Gallery's 1964 exhibition "Boxes" asserted at the time). In this highly successful installation, the Minimalist box was revealed to be one of many possible inflections of cubic form rather than the definitive articulation it is usually held to be.

Next came Mel Bochner's brilliant Measurement: Room, 1969, where the leap from the cube-as-sculpture to white cube was clearly stated. In a previous work, Room-Block, 1966, Bochner envisioned a gallery filled up by a giant black cube. Measurement: Room reverses the conceit of that little-known drawing, substituting volume for mass, emptiness for fullness. Instead of looking at a cubic sculpture, the spectator walks into a cubic space--one whose "emptiness" is made visible through the application of Letraset tape, used here as a serial system of measurement. Further on in the exhibition, Dan Graham's Public Space/Two Audiences, 1976, a mirror installation in which the spectator is perceptually split into two, and Helio Oiticica's Projeto Filtro--Para Vergara NY 1972, 1972/2005, a corridor with audio, video, and gustatorial elements, also convincingly bridged the show's themes of geometry and installation.

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Here the narrative started to unravel. The third gallery was filled with videos and photo documentations of performances. How do we move from cubes to performance, from sculpture to the body? Where does seriality come in? Both Martha Rosler and Joan Jonas employ serial structures in Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975, and Vertical Roll, 1972. Yet the repetitious "real-time" formats of structuralist cinema and the video medium would seem more relevant inspirations than the box sculpture with which we began. Other works seemed even farther afield, such as photographs of Valie Export and Peter Weibel's performance From the Portfolio of Doggedness, 1968, showing Export walking Weibel on a leash through the streets of Vienna, or Lygia Clark's "Sensorial Objects," 1966, which are neither cubic nor serial but idiosyncratic little works made of plastic bags, water, balls, and eye goggles. Marcel Broodthaers's Un Jardin d'hiver, 1974, a "reconstruction" of a nineteenth-century winter garden, is unbelievably charming--but why was it here? Other inclusions exemplifying the show's "poetical" tendency--such as Dimitrije Mangelos's painted globes, laden with unbearable-lightness-of-being profundity--felt forced.