Blurting In A & L

Answer 2/17

Author: John Abbate  
Posted: 13.11.2002; 01:54:40
Topic: Question 2
Msg #: 610 (in response to 418)
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Getting back to the issue at hand, Thomas said:"I don´t exclude poetic sign functions which often coexist with referential and metalingual and sometimes phatic and emotive functions meanwhile imperative functions were usually avoided (except conceptualizations of political slogans)." I would be interested in an elaboration of how the phatic function operates in conceptual art. I wonder whether the discussions of Art & Language might be characterised as either excessively phatic or not phatic enough; that is, their attempt to speak a language other than aesthetics within the context of modern art opens a discursive terrain that, in the absence of the a priori framing conditions that modernist aesthetics provided, demands constant checking to see whether communication is still taking place, whether ART is still happening or still operative, and whether members are all speaking the same language.