Ceal Floyer, Monochrome Till Receipt (White) (1999)

Ceal Floyer, Monochrome Till Receipt (White),  1999

Ink on paper
240 x 60 mm
on paper, print

Collection Tate, purchased 2009

At first glance, this work seems directly related to Dan Graham’s Figurative, 1965. (See above.) However, unlike Graham’s magazine-based work, which plays on multiple meanings of the word “figure,” Floyer conceptually evokes something else, something that may or may not exist in the world outside the frame: the assemblage of all-white products as denoted by the grocery receipt—the “monochrome” referred to in the title.

Conjuring an old chestnut of Conceptualism—”if something exists in language, does it need to exist in another form to be a legitimate work of art?”—Floyer’s work is also deeply connected to the history of painting, gesturing to the monochrome paintings of Ryman, Rauschenberg, Reinhardt, and Klein (not to mention the “achrome” paintings of Manzoni). The “still life” suggested by the objects listed in the receipt also conjures Morandi.

Graham’s word-play mash-up brings together the discourses of accounting (where numbers are “figures”), art history (where a form positioned in relation to a ground is said to be “figurative” and the term “figure” also refers to the body), literature (in which we have “figures” of speech), and places them in the context of print media, which can be said to engage all three, albeit with “populist” or commercial intentions. In another nod to the intellectual concerns of Conceptualism, even the generalized act of thinking is denoted by the word “figure”—as in, “I figure this thing that looks like an ad in a magazine might be a work of art!”

Flarf vs. Conceptual

Flarf vs. Conceptual

Podcast of “Flarf vs. Conceptual,” a reading organized by Kenneth Goldsmith at the Whitney Museum of American Art in conjunction with the recent Jenny Holzer exhibition “PROTECT PROTECT”

Especially memorable is the reading by Christian Bök

Charles Olson

“It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature… . If he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way… . This is not easy. Nature works from reverence, even in her destructions (species go down with a crash). But breath is man’s special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has extended. Language is one of his proudest acts… . I keep thinking, it comes to this: culture displacing the state.” —Charles Olson