With your group, 1) carefully and methodically work through the meaning of your assigned quote (from “Notes on Conceptualisms”) and then 2) apply it either to ANY of the works of conceptual writing we’ve looked at in class (in other words, try to use the quote to explain someone’s work).
Group 1: Conceptual writing is allegorical–it is “a writing of its time, saying slant what cannot be said directly, usually because of overtly repressive political regimes or the sacred nature of the message. In this sense the allegory is dependent on its reader for completion…” (13)
Group 2: “Allegorical writing (particularly in the form of appropriated conceptual writing) does not aim to critique the culture industry from afar, but to mirror it directly. To do so, it uses the materials of the culture industry directly. This is akin to how readymade artworks critique high culture and obliterate the museum-made boundary between Art and Life. The critique is in the reframing. The critique of the critique is in the echoing.” (20)
Group 3: “Pure conceptualism negates the need for reading in the traditional textual sense–one does not need to “read” the work so much as think about the idea of the work. In this sense, pure conceptualisms’s readymade properties mirror the easy consumption/generation of text and the devaluation of reading in the larger culture.” (25)
Group 4: “Radical mimesis is radical artifice: there is nothing so artificial as an absolutely faithful realism.” (28)