The Geneaology of Protocol in Art

The genealogy of protocol in art reveals that from the early twentieth century artists were engaging with processes of rationalisation within everyday life, which develops in the second half of the twentieth century into a profound interest in the logic of computation. For example, attention to mathematical algorithms, geometry, rules and instructions informs the work of artists making minimal and conceptual art: many of them emphasising processes of standardisation, modularisation, rationalisation, incorporation and automation.

Describing the emergence in the 1960s of an ‘ultra-conceptual art’ that ‘emphasi[zed] the thinking process almost exclusively’ [1] Lucy Lippard and John Chandler observed ‘a profound dematerialization of art’ [2] that they believed could ‘result in the object’s becoming wholly obsolete.’ [3] Citing contemporary work such as: ‘Carl Andre: 120 bricks to be arranged according to their mathematical possibilities (1967) […] Sol LeWitt: “non-visual” serial projects incorporating conceptual logic and visual illogic (1968) […] Yves Klein: “empty gallery” show at Iris Clert (April 1958)’; [4] Lippard and Chandler emphasised a shift towards ‘art as idea and art as action.’ [5] They recognised particular attributes in this work that, superseding ‘the anti-intellectual, emotional/intuitive processes of art making characteristic of the last two decades’, [6] marked a shift towards work that was planned and ‘designed’ by artists and ‘executed elsewhere by professional craftsmen.’ [7] The inclusion of the labour of others in the conceptual frame of the work is, I think, a key feature of what I have termed net:art: artists devising the rules or protocols of works which then can be executed or enacted elsewhere by participants.

With attention to a particular ‘”thinness,” ‘both literal and allusive, of such themes as water, steam, dust, flatness, legibility, temporality’ [8] Lippard and Chandler trace to Dada and Surrealism ‘the process of ridding art of its object quality.’ [9] The Dadaists problematised and transgressed pre-existing art forms. They devised works consisting of verbal instructions in which, perhaps, protocol begins to emerge as a medium: that is, protocol materialises temporal processes not as spatial structure but as relation. As the art object became an epilogue to the ‘fully evolved concept,’ the established organisational framework premised on relations between visible, bounded entities gave way; and new artistic processes emerged that focused on the temporal and spatial ‘relations, ratios and proportions between things’ and people.[10] Explicit use of protocol - rules and instructions  that facilitate, organise and, to an extent, control relations between entities – was inevitable.

Lippard and Chandler articulated the emerging art processes of the 1960s with particular reference to artist, Joseph Schillinger’s, categorical chronology of the evolution of art detailed in The Mathematical Basis of the Arts in which he divides ‘the historical evolution of art into five “zones”, each of which replaces the other with increasing acceleration.’ [11]

1.   pre-esthetic, a biological stage of mimicry; 2. traditional-esthetic, a magic, ritual-religious art; 3.emotional-esthetic, artistic expression of emotions, self-expression, art for art’s sake; 4.rational-esthetic, characterized by empiricism, experimental art, novel art; 5. Scientific, post-esthetic, which will make possible the manufacture, distribution and consumption of a perfect art product and will be characterized by a fusion of the art forms and materials, and, finally, a “disintegration of art”, the “abstraction and liberation of the idea”. [12]

Given this framework, Lippard and Chandler suggest that the ultra-conceptual or dematerialised art of the late 1960s, could be in a transitional period between last two zones:

After the intuitive process of recreating esthetic realities through man’s own body, the process of reproduction or imitation, mathematical logic enters into art […] From then on, man became increasingly conscious of the course of his evolution, beginning to create directly from principles without the intercession of reproductive reality’[13]

This blatant disavowal of Romantic sensibility, intuition and feeling is echoed elsewhere in Schillinger’s book, although not cited by Lippard and Chandler: his insistence that the ‘the argument for spontaneous creation must be repudiated’ [14] being of particular interest. Identifying organic work of arts as a combination of various components such as melody, rhythm, harmony, dynamics and phrasing that co-exist ‘all in one’, [15] Schillinger expounds the need to solve the problem of scientifically coordinating several components as one. Following a scientific approach, each component of an artwork is ‘developed individually and correlated thereafter with the other individually developed components’ [16] with the ‘utmost perfection.’ [17] At the same time, their relationship with other components of the same structure may be constantly controlled and integrated. Here to an extent, there is a resonance with Marcel Duchamp’s ‘desire to break up forms - to ‘decompose’ them’, [18] and with his description of Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) as ‘an organization of kinetic elements, an expression of time and space through the abstract presentation of motion’. [19]

There is a clear correlation between Schillinger’s description of the scientific approach to art production, and Minimalism’s reduction of the medium to its components and the overt display of those components. Edward Strickland suggests that minimalism ‘represents the culmination of the whole modernist enterprise of purification of means’ [20] and that ‘[t]he inexorable reductivenes of minimalism may represent the final stages of the dehumanization of art analyzed by Ortega y Gasset in the 1920s.’ [21] Schillinger’s attempts to provide a theory of art that promotes a desire for the ‘manufacture, distribution and consumption of a perfect art product’ [22] through the organisation, control and integration of modular elements clearly resonate with Lippard and Chandler’s articulation of ultra conceptual and dematerialised art. In identifying the process of art-making directly from mathematical principles Schillinger imagines ‘the idea’ algorithmically: as a set of rules able to be ‘enacted’ in time and space. Developing this notion further and qualifying the concept ‘post-aesthetic’, Lippard and Chandler propose the possibility of an ‘aesthetic of principle’ [23] in which particular attention to the rules, instructions, equations, formulae and solutions of art begins to be articulated. ‘The esthetic of principle is still an esthetic, as implied by frequent statements by mathematicians and scientists about the ‘beauty’ of an equation, formula or solution’. [24]

In a letter-essay written in response to Lippard and Chandler’s article [25] Terry Atkinson questions what an aesthetic of principle would entail. Distinguishing between art that is directly material, and art that produces ‘a material entity only as a necessary by-product of the need to record the idea’ [26] he suggests that a philosophy of aesthetics with a focus on the content of artwork is ‘not applicable to an art procedure that records its information in words’. The consequent material qualities of the entity produced (typewritten sheet, audio form or magnetic tape) ‘do not necessarily have anything to do with the idea’. [27] Thus, because ideas ‘are normally recorded in written-sign-word form’ then any aesthetic criteria applied to ‘principles’, should be ‘related to how effectively the written format expresses the information relevant to the state, situation, etc. it is seeking to describe/explain:’[28] It should not refer to the material qualities of the documented idea. Atkinson proposed not an objectless art, but art as theoretical frameworks of enquiry ‘where the content is separated off from the notion of making an art-object’. [29]

Challenging Lippard and Chandler’s articulation of dematerialization Atkinson amplifies the distinction between art that was undergoing further Minimalist reduction and art that had ‘disappeared into the conceptualization of its discourse’ and goes on to express concern that they (Lippard and Chandler) were ‘hinting at some kind of meta-aesthetic’. [30] It is not clear from their text whether or not Lippard and Chandler do ‘intend to imply the principle of the aesthetic of beauty’[31] as Atkinson perhaps suspects. However, it is possible to understand their identification of ‘principle’ not so much in terms of a general law or truth from which others are derived - the ‘theoretical basis’ that Atkinson suggests - but as a rule or law exemplified in the construction or operation of a particular machine or the workings of a particular system. Interpreted in this way the aesthetic of principle becomes a precursor to the aesthetic of protocol, and points to art ‘at the threshold of information’. [32]

Rules, Instructions and Recipes: The Genealogy of Protocol in Art

 In 1967 Sol LeWitt’s relatively speculative ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ had offered a name for an artistic disposition compatible with his own practice, a disposition according to which ‘art’ was rendered consistent with the ‘anti-retinal’ legacy of Duchamp. Published in the  first issue of Art-Language two years later, his more gnomic ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ provided a set of protocols for a movement. [33]

For Sol LeWitt, for whom the emergence and liberation of the ‘idea’ was the most important aspect of conceptual art, the use of ‘principle’ or protocol meant ‘that all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art’. [34]

To work with a plan that is pre-set is one way of avoiding subjectivity. It also obviates the necessity of designing each work in turn. The plan would design the work. Some plans would require millions of variations, and some a limited number, but both are finite. Other plans imply infinity. In each case, however, the artist would select the basic form and rules that would govern the solution to the problem. After that the fewer decisions made in the course of completing the work, the better. This eliminates the arbitrary, the capricious, and the subjective as much as possible. That is the reason for using this method.[35]

 Using simple number systems, LeWitt devised instructions for over a thousand wall drawings, such as ‘Black circles, red grid, yellow arcs from four corners, blue arcs from the midpoints of four sides’ (Wall Drawing #271,1975), executable not just by LeWitt but also by other artists, students or draughts-people.  Lucy Lippard recalls that ‘LeWitt once explained:

“If I do a wall drawing, I have to have the plan written on the wall or label because it aids the understanding of the idea. If I just had lines on the wall, no one would know that there are ten thousand lines within a certain space, so I have two kinds of form – the lines, and the explanation of the lines. Then there is the idea, which is always unstated’. [36]

Here, LeWitt articulates the distinction between the different forms within his work. The lines comprise two parts: their physical manifestation on the wall, and the processes and relations of their execution. The explanation of the lines is the means by which the instructions that enable the lines to be executed are communicated. The idea motivates the other two elements. LeWitt devised the protocols that organise and control the execution of a drawing: he not only put a system in place that unfolded through its execution, he also prescribed the parameters within which the labour of another human exists. In this context, it is interesting to note the fairly authoritative tone of his protocols: ‘Vertical lines, not straight, not touching, covering the wall evenly (Wall Drawing #46, 1970); ‘A line through the center of the wall toward the upper left corner and a line from the center of the wall to the upper right corner.’ [37] Indeed, Lawrence Alloway  identified a correlation between the procedures devised by LeWitt and old schoolbooks such as The Rational Elementary Arithmetic of 1899 that instructed pupils to:

Draw: A line one inch long. A line twice as long as the first line. A line three times as long as the first line. A line twice as long as the second line. A square with each of its sides the length of the first line’. [38]

LeWitt was not the first artist to shift the parameters of the art making process to include relational instructions within the conceptual frame of the artwork. According to Calvin Tomkins, in 1962 when Pontus Hulten wanted to show Robert Rauschenberg’s White Painting series in Stockholm, the original paintings of 1951 no longer existed, having been recycled into other works. Rauschenberg sent the measurements of the originals and a sample of the intense-white pigment and canvas to Hulten who had them recreated.[39] When the White Painting series was shown in the Leo Castelli gallery in 1968, the paintings had apparently vanished again and this time Rauschenberg’s studio assistant, Brice Marden recreated the canvases following the instructions. [40] The reconstructed canvases were not conceptualised or presented as a collaboration of equals between Marden and Rauschenberg; rather the division of labour inherent in traditional roles of artist and draughts-person is implicit. [41] In LeWitt’s drawings and Rauschenberg’s replication of the White Painting series, the instructions organise the labour of others, and their enactment focus in on the relationship between artist and assistant. Exploring the relations of production embedded in Sol LeWitt’s work, Lawrence Alloway suggests that: Provided his ideas are capable of being transmitted and obeyed, he can dominate work done in his absence. In his hands, Conceptual art is executive control. [42] LeWitt devised the rules that defined the parameters of a drawing such that another could enact the process of making the drawing: he put in place a system that unfolded through its own execution; he also prescribed the parameters within which the labour of another human exists.

Similar protocological tendencies are apparent in Fluxus artworks that such as Alison Knowles Proposition (1962) in which performers came out into the performance area, made a salad, and then exited.[43] In Dick Higgins’ Winter Carol (1959) the audience and the performers became synonymous. [44]

[T]he performers were instructed to determine the composition’s duration, then go outdoors for the specified amount of time and listen to the falling snow. No one was invited to “watch,” a format drastically different from that of most happenings, in which audiences were participatory if only by virtue of their cramped proximity to the performers. [45]

 Although a conflation of the role of audience and performer emerged in Fluxus works, there remained a distinction between artist and performer/audience: the artist devised the rules enacted by the performers/audience. In George Brecht’s Motor Vehicle Sundown (1960), each performer received a set of randomly shuffled instruction cards. At dusk they were to go to their cars and execute the instructions on the cards for the specified length of time; beeping horns, rolling windows up and down, turning headlights/radios on and off, switching on lights, and operating windshield wipers. The performance was over when all the performers had completed their tasks and turned off all their car engines. [46] Whereas Fluxus artists and those who influenced them sought alternatives to rationalism in Asian philosophies - Zen Buddhism, for example, influenced John Cage’s experiments in deriving rules from chance and indeterminacy - LeWitt’s rules referenced the overt rationality of simple mathematical equations.

Veiled Grids and Fragile Protocols

Yet, for all their explicit attention to rationalised mathematical formulae, standardisation and the use of protocol to organise the work of another human being, LeWitt’s works challenge rather than reflect the logic of rationalisation and aggregation. Rosalind Krauss cites a 1969 exhibition in Nova Scotia for which LeWitt ‘mailed directions for the work, along with the kind of articulation that never appears on the wall-label: “A work that uses the idea of error, a work that uses the idea of infinity; a work that is subversive, a work that is not original.”’[47] Krauss argues from this that LeWitt’s ideas ‘exist on an entirely different order than that of the mathematical, the deduction, and the axiomatic.’ [48] She suggests that ‘if one uses the “idea of error” to generate a work, one has done something quite different from illustrating an order that is ideated or Ideal, the order LeWitt’s critics keep insisting on associating with his art.’ [49] She begins to articulate a contradiction in LeWitt’s work between chaos and order the consequences of which is his arrival at the opposite of idealism.” [50]

So perhaps the drawings produced with attention to logical processes are not, in the end, beholden to them, just as, all along, Duchamp’s work and Minimalist sculpture give attention to the human, and to feelings. And for LeWitt, although conceptual art is informed by logical procedures it is not necessarily logical.

Whilst some of LeWitt’s wall drawings are ‘schematic echoes of architectural form’, others are ‘a kind of wall mist,’ [51] and Lawrence Alloway describes the pale, fragile drawings emerging from the systematic shading generated from his instructions as being ‘at the threshold of legibility’. Alloway presumes the influence of Agnes Martin on LeWitt’s work, and suggests that ‘[t]he sense of a thin sensitized skin is similar in both artists’ [52] with the seamless surface of Martin’s grids signifying ‘for all its linear precision, an image dissolving:’ something ‘half-way between a rectangular system of coordinates and a veil’. [53]

In the work of both artists, there is attention given to the relationship between concept and its physical manifestation and between ordering systems and their execution or enactment. Though the grid is usually associated with abstract and mathematical thinking and as reflective of the logical order of the mind, the slight irregularities in Martin’s hand-drawn grids quietly destabilises its logic. Martin makes a place [54] in which subtle feelings emerge in non-hierarchical relation to the grid, such that neither one nor the other dominates or incorporates the other.

Although there are significant similarities in approach between Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt, the properties of the different media through which their work emerges marks a divide between them. Martin works with the material frame of the canvas, precisely exploring the very parameters of her medium; at times extending the grid to edges of the canvas. LeWitt works with protocol as a medium: dematerialising - through processes of conceptualisation - the mapping of relations, dimensions and time in space. Although LeWitt and Martin both use fairly rigorous and formal procedures to make the work, something beyond the formal emerges in their work that cannot be suppressed.

Notes

1.  Lippard and Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” 31.

2.  Ibid.

3.  Ibid.

4. Ibid, 32.

5. Ibid., 32.

6. Ibid., 31.

7. Ibid.

7. Ibid., 34.

9.Ibid.

10.  Ibid. 31.

11.  Lippard and Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” 31.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., 47.

14.  Schillinger, The Mathematical basis of the arts, 30.

15.  Ibid.

16. Ibid., 31.

17.  Ibid.

18.  Marcel Duchamp quoted in Lippard and Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” 34.

19.  Ibid.

20.  Strickland, Minimalism: Origins, 3.

21.  Ibid.

22.  Schillinger, The Mathematical basis of the arts, 17.

23.  Lippard and Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” 31.

24.  Ibid.

25.  Atkinson, “Concerning the article “The dematerialization of art,” 52-58.

26.  Ibid., 54. Atkinson notes that ideas can be recorded ‘in typewritten form or in audio form or in magnetic tape.’

27.  Ibid.

28. Ibid., 55.

29. Ibid., 54.

30.  Atkinson, “Concerning the article “The dematerialization of art,” 56.

31.  Ibid.

32.  Phrase borrowed from Alberro, “At the Threshold of Art as Information.”

33.  Harrison, Essays on Art & Language, 47.

34.  LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 12.

35.  LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 13.

36.  Lippard, Sol LeWitt, 27.

37.  LeWitt, Wall Drawing #171, 1973.

38.  Alloway, Topics in American art since 1945, 97.

39.  Tomkins, “Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time” cited in Strickland Minimalism: Origins, 27.

40.  Strickland, Minimalism: Origins, 27.

41. Ibid.

42. Alloway, 1975, p.99

43. Haskell, Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance, 1958- 1964, 49.

44. Ibid., 49-50.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., 49.

47.  Lucy Lippard, “The Structures, The Structures and the Wall Drawings, The Structures and the Wall Drawings and the Books,” 27.

48.  Ibid.

49.  Ibid.

50.  Rosalind Krauss, “LeWitt in Progress,” 255.6.

51.  Alloway, Topics in American art since 1945, 96.