| This dissertation examines the linguistic turn in the visual arts, circa 1970. Many artists—often called “conceptualist”—mobilized language as an artistic strategy, hoping to democratize artistic production and consumption. My project situates this aesthetic movement within the larger field of structuralism and its account of language, defined by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan, among others. Structuralism represented the notion that all human endeavors were inescapably governed by language's grid-like order, and that sociality could be epistemically mastered through a “science” of the signifier. Structuralisms from many fields of inquiry{09}linguistics, literary studies, social sciences—believed they could extract the underlying codes of social phenomena from the details that obscured them. Like artists, they turned to language hoping for a revolution in signifying structures.; I argue that the visual arts became a field where these claims were imaged and tested. My dissertation departs from 1970, when the conceptualist project, though increasingly institutionalized, had begun to lose its critical edge. In Chapter One, my examination of MoMA's Information show demonstrates that it was not just language that had emerged onto the visual field, but a ‘linguistico-informational’ style, within which the artwork was systematized, stripped down, or abbreviated as information conveyed through words. For many artists, therefore, the grid also became the deep structure of the visible world.; In subsequent chapters I focus on the work of three practitioners who resisted this style, and questioned the structuralist world-picture and its reconfiguration of visibility as a figure of epistemic mastery. Robert Morris's drawing practice discloses that time, the body, and the phenomenal are sacrificed by the disciplining effects of structural order. Robert Smithson reveals that when grid-based systems—perspectival, cartographic, linguistic—are mapped onto the world, their rationalisms crumble, and the illogic of matter produces another kind of sense. Mary Kelly visualizes the ways in which the symbolic order not only shapes our social institutions, but also seduces us with its intellectualisms and scientisms. I conclude by anticipating the lessons which we might take from this linguistic turn, now that the visual world is saturated with the informational aesthetic of digitality. |
