Eve Meltzer’s Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn returns readers to the structuralist adventure in art history. To recall something of the stakes and texture of that adventure, consider the following exchange in 1976 between Robert Morris, an artist, and A. A., a blind woman hired to assist him with a series of drawings entitled Blind Time II.

[R. M.:] “Letting the page stand as a ground for yourself, an analog, letting the space of the page stand as an analog for yourself—”

[A. A.:] “Where are you getting this?”

[R. M.:] “I’m reading it out of my notebook. Rub out distinct, separate areas with both hands, letting each area represent an area of desire” (115).

“Ground,” “analog,” “area of desire.” Suggestive words such as these reverberated along the corridors of universities in the United States, settling into departments of art history in the 1990s. In graduate seminars of the time, professors could have read these words out of their notebooks. Most likely, they learned them from the structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers who came to define a new, theoretical art history: Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland Barthes, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The arrival of structuralist theory in departments of art history in the United States was a watershed. (However, one should note Thomas Crow’s pertinent remarks, in The Intelligence of Art [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000], about the neglect of Claude Lévi-Strauss in this reception.) The critical tools of structuralism opened the work of art to the play of signifiers, revealing the arbitrary nature of form and meaning. If meaning was constituted through difference, it became clear that cherished conceptions of the artist, the artwork, and the discipline were held in place by what these conceptions permitted and denied. The arrival of structuralism signaled high time for a grand archaeology of art history, for a great examination into the accepted and the excluded. The critique of the discipline precipitated by structuralism continued with the arrival of poststructuralism, and, with it, of deconstruction, institutional critique, and identity politics.

Structuralism dovetailed with the critique of humanism, issuing in the antihumanist turn evoked in the title of Meltzer’s book. The critique of humanism exposed the sovereignty of a (commanding, seamless, male) subject and of a totalizing sense of history that reduced the past into one shape and value system. Admonishing A. A. to let the page stand as a ground for herself, Morris suggests the inquiry into the subject that underpins the structuralist critique. Indeed, the words “ground,” “analog,” and “area of desire” can be seen to imply the exposure of what humanism rested upon, of what it set beside itself, and of the emotion the objective voice of disciplinary writing prohibited. “Area of desire” is especially potent in this context, since works of Conceptual art are usually understood as purged of affect. Art history has taught that in Conceptual art the subject and the work of art take on the features of systematicity in order to expose a contemporary world overtaken by networks of information, administration, entertainment, and more. In one of the book’s epigraphs, the artist Robert Smithson pungently captures this conceptualist sense of the world circa 1969: “And I look at the sky and I say, ‘Beautiful, man.’ And what do you say? You say, ‘Make a system out of it.’”

The famous dematerialization of the art object in conceptualism bears witness to the pressures of critique, while the unmasking of the humanist subject (and more) in art history reveals theory at work. In four main chapters, Meltzer focuses on the “disembodied, disaffected” subject of Conceptual art (from what she argues are the beginnings of Conceptual art in 1966 to its reputed peak, or end, in 1973) and on how this art has been read by art historians in the United States. Intriguingly, the book’s argument does not proceed via the artists and artworks of conceptualism, but by pinpointing the various “aesthetic strategies and figures . . . most often associated with conceptualism,” including “systems and structures, language and ‘information,’ and the scientistic and seemingly disaffected mode of rendering the visual field and, more generally, of managing experience” (8). Art history has defined conceptualism as consisting in these “aesthetic strategies and figures.” It follows that the book examines works of art and exhibitions studied by art historians as well as key texts written by them, including Rosalind Krauss’s landmark structuralist essay, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” of 1979, which Meltzer considers “conceptualist in its rhetoric” (8).

Part of the book’s brief is to reveal the way meaning is made in art history. This is an important point. Theory can be construed simply as a device with which to open up the work of art. When theoretical concerns subsume the work of art into preexisting categories, however, theory can also make the work of art. When these readings are repeated and recycled, the dynamic, critical force of theory is diminished. The antihumanist turn brought to awareness the abduction of the subject, what Lucy Lippard calls the subject’s “cultural kidnapping,” and its “production” by “an ideological world that is always in place and already awaiting” (7). Louis Althusser’s theory of the interpellation of the subject, which Meltzer nicely describes as a turning toward ideology, is iterated in several chapters to demonstrate the subject’s enmeshing with ideology. Examining the work of Morris and Smithson, as well as by Vito Acconci, Hans Haacke, Nancy Holt, Mary Miss, Mary Kelly, and Sol LeWitt, Meltzer shows that in the antihumanist turn the subject emerged without the particularities that characterize the individual person. Stripped of specificity, the subject ensnared by ideology is fit for the unmasking processes of critique. What could be better than the subject and the artwork fit for critique being subjected to critique by art historians, using the tools of structuralist and poststructuralist analysis? All would seem well and good, and even electrifying, as Meltzer rightly remarks in reference to passages in the writing of Krauss and others, except that this critique has often missed the artwork’s particular affective charge. Seeing Conceptual art under the sign of systems has not only obscured this charge, it has also prompted a consideration of these works as “resolutely anti-visual” (7). If affect purportedly disappeared in structuralism and the antihumanist turn, Systems We Have Loved discloses what a love affair with these systems has foreclosed, including “the slips and chiasms of subjectivity that structuralism can’t account for” (10).

Meltzer’s aim “to recalibrate the intellectual-historical optic under which we interpret the meaning” of the “far-reaching aesthetic forms” of conceptualism (8) is met more often than not, and her incisive reexamination of the relationship between artworks and texts deserves careful reading. Kelly’s multi-part Post-Partum Document (1973–79) is studied in an especially satisfying chapter. Post-Partum Document, a work of complex, saturated Lacanian psychoanalytic language, charts the “cultural kidnapping” of Kelly’s son, which is to say, his “production” as a subject. Anyone conversant with Lacan could agree with Meltzer in saying that he “turns away from one sort of visibility . . . to find a representational strategy stripped of the obfuscations of desire” (171). The theory machismo of Post-Partum Document resonates with this sense of structuralism and conceptualism, and, yet, it jostles with the material stains and smears of the body of the artist’s son and his tender crushing beneath the gears of the symbolic order. Turning toward the theoretical and visual nature of Post-Partum Document, the book illuminates the affect in the work’s “slips and chiasms of subjectivity.” In the “odd coupling” of “Mary’s grief and Lacan’s science” (173), the 135 units of Post-Partum Document depict a mounting and devastating sense of “the way in which desire and affect function with respect to its representational means” (174). This is to say that desire and affect are here neutered by the very means used to represent them. The power of Post-Partum Document lies in part in the way affect is discharged in the face of a stacked deck of stripped theory, which is to say, a theory “stripped of the obfuscations of desire.”

Kelly’s signature artwork not only tells of structuralism, conceptualism, motherhood, and the vice-grip of systems. History inheres and is mediated in its materiality and in its silent yet confrontational mode of address. This history bears a particular relation to Britain, and to the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain, of which Kelly was a co-founder, as Meltzer mentions in passing. Although Kelly would later return to the United States, and Post-Partum Document would become a fixture of the new, theoretical art history in America, the work bears a complex relation to its time and place of making. This connection between the artwork and its historical circumstances has been obscured in writing that proceeds, as this book does, “from the vantage of artistic practice” in the United States (5). In perpetuating an evaporation of history, or an evacuation of history into the artwork, Meltzer courts the risk of fixing meaning, which it is the book’s aim to critique. Open to the vagaries and particularities of history, the work of art wages meaning in and against the forces of society, time, and art history. Closing off this tumult, staying meaning in the structures of politics and ideology, as much as in those of discipline and discourse, implicates the work in existing power structures. It also limits the ways in which the work of art, and theory, can engage with the world. At its best, Systems We Have Loved captures the dynamic, critical force of theory, and it shows why structures of power must never remain hidden.

Overall, the book opens a rich vein of inquiry into art history in the United States. Beyond the imperative to interrogate humanism and modernism, we might now ask: What were the conditions of possibility of the structuralist adventure in art history? What allowed for the adventure, and, importantly, what enabled it to become synonymous with the right way of proceeding? The point of such questioning is not to lead a reactionary charge against theory but to seek its place, and its appropriate role, in a robustly critical discipline.

The exchange between Morris and A. A., which opens this review, closes like this:

[A. A.:] “What the hell are you talking about.”

[R. M.:] “Make size and pressure consistent with the strength of the desire. You can name or not name each one of these areas.”

[A. A.] “I’m leaving” (115).

A. A. walked out. The artist’s system was not a system she had loved. Blind Time II was left unfinished.

Crucially, cleverly, during the structuralist adventure the ideologies of humanism and modernism were unmasked. In art history in the United States, however, this unraveling became its own ideology, its own proscriptive device. Instead of exposing the limits of our discourse through critique, we have wallowed in the terms and conditions of a theoretical art history. Perhaps it is time to subject art history’s adventure to the spirit of critique. Systems We Have Loved reveals some of what our cherished systems have obscured. It also suggests what we might gain from seeing the work of art anew.