ABSTRACT
Nothing marks the gulf separating the Conceptual art of the late 1960s and early 1970s from its post-and neo-Conceptual progeny of today more strikingly than their respective relations to philosophy. Indeed, one might be tempted to claim that it is in the intimacy of its relationship to philosophyan intimacy at times verging on complete identification -that the specificity of Conceptual art resides, were its formation not so multiple and complex, despite its relatively brief life, as to refuse any such straightforward definition. Philosophy has been deployed too often as a weapon in the wars between Conceptual artists to be used unproblematically either as part of the criteria for the conceptuality of a work or as a neutral medium for debate about it. In this respect, even to raise the question of the relationship of Conceptual art to philosophy as an issue through which to re-examine the idea of Conceptual art is already to court the danger of situating oneself on one particular side of a series of factional divides. Yet it is precisely here, I shall argue, in its divisive, polemical role within the Conceptual art community that the importance of philosophy for Conceptual art lies, including its less explicitly or directly philosophical manifestations.
