Shall We Kill Daddy?
Mike Kelley
The following article was written by Mike Kelley for a catalog on the work of Douglas Huebler. The catalog, which was released in the spring of 1997, and published in conjunction with the "Origin and Destination" exhibition series at the Sociètè des Expositions du Palais de Beaux Arts, in Brussels.
"...When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts - we want it to happen!
They will come against us, our successors, will come from far away, from every quarter, dancing to the winged cadence of their first songs, flexing the hooked claws of predators, sniffing doglike at the academy doors the strong odor of our decaying minds, which already will have been promised to the literary catacombs.
But we won't be there . . . At last they'll find us - one winter's night - in open country, beneath a sad roof drummed by a monotonous rain. They'll see us crouched beside our trembling airplanes in the act of warming our hands at the poor little blaze that our books of today will give out when they take fire from the flight of our images.
They'll storm around us, panting with scorn and anguish, and all of them, exasperated by our proud daring, will hurtle to kill us, driven by hatred: the more implacable it is, the more their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us."
- Filippo Thomas Marinetti
- From "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism," 1909
"It is not my intention to point out a negative aspect of the work, but only to show that Huebler - who is in his mid-forties and much older than most of the artists discussed here - has not as much in common with the aims in the purer versions of "Conceptual Art" as it would superficially seem."
Joseph Kosuth From "Art After Philosophy," 1969
First of all, I am an ex-student of Douglas Huebler. I studied with Doug at the California Institute of the Arts in the mid- Seventies, a period many romanticize as its Conceptualist heyday. In fact Doug was my "mentor," the faculty member charged with keeping an eye on me. Actually, I chose him because I could not get along with the mentor I had been assigned to. Doug came into the school as chair of the Department of Art at exactly the same time as I arrived as a student. We have another thing in common - we went to the same Undergraduate Art School: the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Despite the fact that Doug graduated twenty-one years before I did, we still had some of the same teachers and courses. Hard to believe, isn't it? Oh, we have one other thing in common. . . Doug Huebler and I share the same birthday: October 27. He was born exactly thirty years before I was.
When asked to write a short essay on the work of Douglas Huebler for this catalogue, I immediately said yes. That was quite a while ago, and now I sit here and scratch my head. I am finding it difficult to begin. I will say first that I like Douglas Huebler's work very much. I will say that I am a fan. But talking, writing about it, expressing my interest in his practice, in language, is hard for me. Why is that? I had never given it much thought before. Some artist's work instantly provokes a stream of commentary from my lips, almost involuntarily - like drool, but not Doug's. His work seems to ask me to ponder upon it. But then my response is generally in opposition to this directive. I have an unconscious physical response - I laugh. I am confused, and this is a surprise in that, on the surface, his work often looks so dumbly straightforward. There is an image, typically a quite mundane and recognizable one, accompanied by text which one would expect would elaborate on, or explain, the image. It does not do so. Instead, in Huebler's terms, the text "collides" or "dances" with the image. You expect the expected first. This expectation is induced through familiar visual terms. Then, through the use of the device, which in our culture is the most common mode of explication - the written explanation, this expectation is destabilized. What looks so familiar, becomes ungraspable. The result is not so much "uncanny," that is, the familiar become unfamiliar, as it is annoying. We crave familiarity and instead we are made dizzy. Like children in school we seek to please the erudite master, the one who orders, who renders in clear language the visual chaos of the world. We seek to please him through our understanding of his message, through shared communion with him. But this is a cruel teacher whose lessons elude understanding. You are only left with yourself, and the nervous laughter of doubt.
When I was asked what the theme of my essay would be, I said something to the affect that it would be about "ageism". I didn't know exactly why I said that at the time. It just blurted out of me. And I know that this subject might not seem to be an appropriate one for an essay in an artist's monograph, since it could be seen to prioritize the social reception of the artist's work over and above his own intentions. Yet Doug's age is something that has been of great consequence in the reception of his work over the years. Just take a look at the Kosuth quote above and that fact is clear. In 1969, in Conceptualism's infancy, Doug's age was already an issue. It was an issue, in a different manner, in the mid Seventies when I was a student of his. And even now, when Doug is being reintroduced into art history as a Conceptualist master and, you would think, his age should no longer be of any importance, it continues to be so.
For example, in Frederic Paul's opening essay in the monograph accompanying Huebler's 1993 exhibition at the F.R.A.C Limousin, he reintroduces the issue. Paul provides a list of sixteen artists, associated with various recent art movements, who are listed chronologically by their birth date. Huebler is located third from the top with a birth date of 1924; Kosuth comes in last with 1945.
Following this list are some possible interpretations of it concerning Huebler's "late development": "...either one concludes that Douglas Huebler was the founding father and prime mover of conceptual art (it has to be admitted that precious few have reached this conclusion) or alternately one can opt for the view of Huebler as a sort of aging dandy, versatile and shrewd enough to jump on the bandwagon. . ." The latter reading of Huebler as an artworld Humbert Humbert (Huebler Huebler?) succumbing to Conceptualism's late Sixties Lolita-like charms strikes me as especially amusing considering the critical and economic clout Conceptualism held at the time. What, one wonders, was Huebler supposed to gain from jumping on the Conceptualist bandwagon? If the answer is youthful vigor by association, Doug could have more- wisely decided to put a flower in his hair and gone to San Francisco as part of the flower child "summer of love."
What is the implied purpose of Paul's list of artist's birth dates? What does it immediately intimate? The unfortunate answer is that we still expect artists to conform to some clearly constructed time line of progressive art historical development. Kosuth's estimation that Huebler was too old to be a pure Conceptual Artist has become so entrenched in the history of Conceptualism, as it now stands, that this premise must always now be addressed in discussing his work. Here I am, doing it again. If Huebler was too old to be a Conceptual artist, then what was he? A poser perhaps, but since posing doesn't seem antithetical to the aims of Conceptualism, his problem must be that he is the wrong kind of poser. An even sadder conclusion would be that he was simply not a young enough poser to fulfill the expectations an era, the late Sixties, when youth itself was portrayed as avant garde. Given this mindset, if Conceptualism was to be understood as vanguard it could not be seen in the company of "old men." The equation of counter culture with youth culture was the kitsch philosophy of the moment.
Not surprisingly, Huebler's most-often discussed works of late are his early works which, contrary to his problemitized definition as a Conceptualist, prove he was indeed one. They do so both through their dates, and through their outward appearance, which conform to our expectations of what a "Conceptualist" artwork should look like. Maps, diagrams, unprofessional photography, and simple understated typography are the dominant signifiers of this art historical mode which is now in the process of being institutionally defined (witness the two recent museum survey shows of Conceptual Art: l'art conceptual une perspective held at the Musee d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1990, and Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1995). By focusing on these early works, Huebler can be more easily assimilated into this fresh history of Conceptualism which, like all histories, is less complicated and diverse than the reality it purports to convey.
I am not here to discuss these early photographic works, even though I thoroughly respect them. I personally am more interested in Huebler's work when it begins to take into account his own historical placement. This is most easily observed in his large- scale project, collectively titled Crocodile Tears, begun in 1981 but which Huebler sees as an outgrowth of his Variable Piece #70 of 1971 - loosely described as a proposal to "photographically document the existence of everyone alive." Crocodile Tears is a project that Doug continues to work on until this day.
As the story goes, a conversation about Conceptual Art with Hollywood B movie director/producer Roger Corman resulted in Huebler writing a screenplay - the aforementioned Crocodile Tears. When asked about it, Doug isn't very clear about the choice of title, but when the viewer is faced with the plethora of complaints emanating from the cast of unsympathetic characters portrayed in the project, the choice is not surprising. The initial script (presented in synopsis in the catalogue for the show Douglas Huebler held at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art in 1988) concerns the daring exploits of performance artist Jason James. The ridiculous and convoluted story paints James as a comic book super hero-artist, willing to perform death-defying stunts in order to fund his utopian arts organization: the "Vincent Foundation," (named after his favorite artist - Vincent Van Gogh), aided by his lover/sidekick: Feminist artist Mollie Trainor. The script is filled with allusions to many of the artworld preoccupations of that moment: spectacle, body art, tech and computer art, multinational corporate conspiracy theory, anti-art commodity rhetoric, and PC politics. A side plot concerns James being hunted by an exconvict who was jailed as the result of an earlier James Conceptual artwork.
This is an allusion to a work by Huebler from 1969, Duration Piece #15, where Huebler himself offers a reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of bank robber Edmund McIntyre. This piece is then recontextualized, through Variable Piece #70 of 1971 (the piece where Huebler states his intention to photographically document the existence of everyone alive), into the Crocodile Tears project as Variable Piece # 70 (In Process) Global, 1981, Crocodile Tears: Inserts "Woody Wright." In this work, McIntyre is replaced with current "wanted by FBI" criminal William Leslie Arnold, who is recast in the Crocodile Tears narrative as Woody Wright - the killer out to get hero Jason James. This particular work also inaugurates Huebler's return to painting, at least in a quotational manner, in that it also contains a painting of Arnold, supposedly done by Jason James, where he is depicted, "as he might look today" - aged to make up for the fact that his photo on the wanted poster is twenty years old. This portrait of Arnold/Wright is painted in the manner of Vincent Van Gogh who, as you might remember, is James' favorite artist.
At this point Huebler's work, already complex, goes in a direction exceedingly layered. As the Crocodile Tears project progresses, he begins to add to it parallel or tangential elements which seem quite extraneous to the plot at hand. Older works and working methodologies, art historical allusions presented via paintings done in the manner of famous artists, and side narratives about characters only marginally connected (if at all) to the Jason James story (illustrated in a cartoonish manner), all compete for attention. Whereas in his early work Huebler was quite reserved visually, limiting himself to diagrams, simple type written texts and snapshots, the work now becomes almost psychedelic in its overload of elements.
In much of Huebler's early work there had been a tension between surface blandness and infinite meaning. Take for example Duration Piece #2, Paris, 1970, where the viewer is presented with six snapshots said to illustrate the "timeless serenity" of a statue seen in the distance behind some cement trucks. The accompanying text informs us of the mechanistic intervals at which the statue was photographed, but also tells us that the photos have been shuffled so they are chronologically out of sequence. No longer reportage, we are instead presented with time scrambled - which produces, I suppose, the statue's "timeless serenity." In other examples, too numerous to mention, Huebler similarly activates banally presented visual information via text. With Crocodile Tears the visual presentation of the work takes on an unprecedented equality with the text. You might say that the image itself is for the first time treated as a text instead of an invisible convention.
Let's consider for a moment a work by Mel Bochner from 1970 titled Language is not Transparent. I've always found this a particularly annoying and compelling work, and in some ways one of "Conceptualism's" most self conscious works. The work consists of a sloppily dripping band of black paint on the wall, large enough to contain the phrase "Language is not Transparent" which is written upon it in chalk. At first the work elicits a tautologically induced "So what?" from the viewer, but then the work's very inability to define, aided by its limited presentational mode, opens up a vista of questions. The work seems to be full of very particular allusions: in its drippy execution - to the Abstract Expressionist Oedipal father of Conceptual/Minimal art, and in its use of off hand lettering in chalk on a black surface - to some kind of childish educational scenario. These things cannot simply be looked through to the abstract message of the phrase. They inform and color the phrase; they problemitize its abstraction. Yet what this piece by Bochner tells us cannot be done, much early Conceptualist art asks us to do. Huebler himself writes, in 1969, " I use the camera as a 'dumb' copying device that only serves to document whatever phenomena appears before it through the conditions set by a system. No 'esthetic' choices are possible." In essence, Doug is telling us that his photographs are transparent. It is possible, because the photos are "non aesthetic," to look through them directly into the system they exemplify. I could never accept this proposition.
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