Biography after Conceptualism Ann Stephen: On Looking at Looking: The Art and Politics of Ian Burn
Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Publishing 2006
John Stringer referred to Ian Burn in a catalogue essay from 1992 as having the ‘unique distinction of being the only Australian ever to be central to an internationally significant art movement’.1 The art movement is, of course, Conceptual Art and in particular Burn’s work from 1970-1977 with the most ascetic and cerebral group of conceptualists, Art & Language. Despite this international significance, Burn is not well known outside the contemporary art world, as Ann Stephen notes in her recently published book, On Looking at Looking: The Art and Politics of Ian Burn. Hopefully, Stephen’s very engaging book will redress this anomaly and bring the work and the ideas of one of our very few internationally renowned artists to the attention of a much larger audience.
On Looking at Looking is a hard book to characterise or categorise. It is a kind of hybrid, at once biography and monograph, yet not really properly conforming to either genre. This unusual form addresses the difficulty of fitting Burn’s life and work into the typical modes of art/life documentation. The typical assumptions about the artist, and his or her originality, which usually shape such genres of art writing, run counter to Burn’s aims and methods, and those of conceptual art more generally. Conceptual art, like minimalism before it, rejected the expressive view of art and the psychobiographical link between art and artist that usually underpins this approach to the function of art. Stephen’s brilliant solution to the challenges of producing an account of the life of an individual conceptual artist is to allow ‘the working life’ to unfold roughly chronologically—hence the book has the kind of readability and engaging narrative pull