The crucial difference between dematerializing the art object—famously suggested by Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler in their article “The Dematerialization of Art,” first published in Art International 12:2 (February 1968): 31–36—and working without material basis in the first place, i.e., dealing with ideas, has already been pointed out by Terry Atkinson of Art & Language in his response “Concerning the Article ‘The Dematerialization of Art.’” See Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999), 46–58.
See Luis Camnitzer’s critique of a formalist understanding of dematerialization, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2007), 29.
Think, for example, of Robert Barry’s Telephatic Piece (1969), his contribution to a group exhibition in Canada that consisted of a written statement that he would telepathically transmit, as it was not “applicable to language or image.”
Luis Camnitzer, op. cit., 22–24.
Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” in Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 123.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1988), 40.
Ibid., 44.
Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5:10 (Summer 1967): 79–84. Also see Alberro, op. cit., 12.
Sol Lewitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” Art-Language 1:1 (May 1969): 11–13; reprinted in Conception: Conceptual Documents 1968–1972, ed. Catherine Moseley (Norwich, UK: Norwich Gallery, 2001), 82.
Walter Benjamin, op. cit., 142.
Romantischer Konzeptualismus / Romantic Conceptualism, ed. Ellen Seifermann and Jörg Heiser (Nürnberg: Kunsthalle Nürnberg and BAWAG foundation Vienna, Kerber Verlag, 2007).
Friedrich Schlegel, “On Incomprehensibility,” in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2003): 297-307.
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1977), 5.
Ibid., 337.
Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: Lebensgeschichte einer deutschen Jüdin aus der Romantik (München: Piper, 2008), 65 (my translation).
Ibid., 71 (my translation).
Friedrich Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments, no. 116,” in Friedrich Schlegel: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991): 31–32.