Figures de la tautologie dans l'art et le discours critique des annees 1960

Numerous tautologies are found throughout the artistic and critical discourse of the 1960's, as exemplified by Frank Stella's famous expression, "What you see is what you see." And the rhetorical device seems, during that decade, to give rise to an original form in certain works-such as Joseph Kosuth's Five Words in Green Neon (1965), which appears to describe itself. The transition from tautology as trope to tautology as form is arguably a key phenomenon in late modernism. As we learn in Chapter I, the use of tautology, already evident in the writings of early abstract artists, is related to the search of modern painting's specificity: the rhetorical figure affirms the visual autonomy of this painting while disqualifying any ekphrasis that claims to provide a verbal equivalent. But during the 1960's this discourse on the work of art-viewed as a necessary, but external, mediation-became, in some conceptual works, interiorized as a discourse from the work of art itself, since these very works integrate their own description. To support this hypothesis, Chapter I introduces the methodological framework of the research. The linguistic and philosophic definitions of tautology are explained, the various texts shedding light about tautology in minimal and conceptual art are surveyed, and the tautological form of some conceptual works-in distinction to self-referentiality-is explained. Chapter II shows how tautology, as it was employed in the discourse of Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella-as well as used as the inspiration for commentaries on Stella's work-exposes the aporia faced by modernist painting. The formula aimed at affirming the specificity of their painting exposes by its very eloquence the crucial role that verbal mediation plays in it. The idea of a strict segregation between the visual and the textual, on which their work is based, is thus challenged, and three responses to the paradox appear in subsequent artistic production. Chapter III identifies the first two of these responses. Either the impasse is denied by reaffirming the segregation between image and discourse, as a number of commentators on minimalist art do by analyzing it from the perspective of literality, or the inevitable impurity is acknowledged by integrating discourse and painting, a practice observed in the works of On Kawara, Art & Language, and John Baldessari. The last chapter examines a third alternative, the denial of the need for specificity, which certain works by Robert Morris, Kosuth and Dan Graham manage to do in their trying to coincide with the text that describes them. These conceptual works of art appear to respond to the unresolved aporia of modernist painting, by integrating in their very form the tautology that had been used to affirm the visual sovereignty of painting. By interiorizing their ekphrasis, they discover an original way to negotiate the inevitable coexistence of the visual and the textual. Tautology is thus shown as creating a passageway between modernism's autoreferentiality and the context-based dimension of institutional critique of the 1970's.