Conceptual Art and Language: Introducing a Logico-Semantic Analysis

This article suggests a logico-semantic analysis of Keith Arnatt’s Trouser-Word Piece

and Victor Burgin’s Room, based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s examination of the logical

relationship between propositions and the world and M.A.K. Halliday’s discussion of

social semiotics. It reconsiders the use of language in conceptual art practices from a

wider sociological and interdisciplinary perspective, and aims to show how their

juxtaposition of different voices within a public context negotiates the space of art as a

social space. Focusing on how artworks communicate in context, the following

discussion presents the historical as well as the discursive environment in which

Arnatt’s and Burgin’s works are situated and received; moreover, it examines how

these works critically manipulate viewing and reading regimes, frameworks of

evaluation and patterns of communication in order to create a situation of particular

tension between perceptual and conceptual apprehension. In wider terms, this article

demonstrates how critically engaged artworks manipulate the conditions of communication by utilizing loan rhetoric (a rhetoric external to the art context) and displace

associate meaning in order to challenge the institutionalization of art’s production and

function. In doing so, they critically stage and contest the power structures that

support corresponding hierarchies across producer, audience and mediator, and bring

art’s social modality into focus. Investigating the manipulation of language in

conceptual art, this article proposes a method of analysis that becomes fundamental

in studying contemporary multi-modal art production, and in understanding the

dialectics of art’s communication and critical potential.