Are Remarks History? Gertrude Stein as Conceptual Artist
Most of you know that in a funny kind of way you are nearer your grandparents than your parents [. . .]. I created a movement of which you are the grandchildren.
--Gertrude Stein
1 Although critics typically characterize Gertrude Stein as a modernist, it is at least as useful to approach her as an antecedent for language-based conceptual and activist artists emerging during the second half of the twentieth century, such as Barbara Kruger and the Guerrilla Girls. As critic Tony Godfrey explains, "Conceptual art is not about forms or materials, but about ideas and meanings. It cannot be defined in terms of any medium or style, but rather by the way it questions what art is" (4). Conceptual artists pose questions rather than make assertions. In particular, they challenge viewers to revisit their notions of what traditional measures of merit (whether artistic, literary, or historical) imply. With her penchant for estranging familiar words from their association with common ideas, Stein challenges readers — both in her day and in ours — to think in more abstract terms, to challenge conventions of statement, to contest the constraints of artistic hierarchies, literary formulas, and historical methods; to question traditional assumptions about what is good, usual, natural, beautiful, true, or memorable. Stein's work, with its distinctive properties — brazen self-referentiality, preoccupation with mass culture and ready-mades, deformation of narrative strategy and voice, and bold explorations of the edges and interstices of both the body's senses and the mind's symbolic systems (such as images and words)—anticipates many of the themes that would later fascinate conceptual artists, including exclusionary language practices and claims to monumental or immutable truths. Therefore, while Stein's career and life concluded before much of the work that would eventually be characterized as language-based conceptual and activist art took shape, she, along with other avant-garde figures of her era such as Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso engaged in climate- and precedent-setting work for conceptual art emerging decades later. In this way, Gertrude Stein helped set in motion a "movement" sustained and extended by language artists and activist artists now working, both in the United States and elsewhere.
2 Two conceptual art pieces form the bookends around this investigation. The first is a 1974 work by sculptor Claes Oldenburg, entitled "Picasso Cufflinks." This sketch for an installation (or "colossal monument," as he calls them) adapts Picasso's Chicago sculpture (elsewhere immortalized by Gwendolyn Brooks' poem, "Chicago Picasso"), as a distinctive pair of cufflinks. The second is a 1994 work by contemporary artist Janine Antoni, entitled "Tender Buttons," not coincidentally the title of one of Gertrude Stein's most critically acclaimed books of poetry. In a black crushed-velvet jeweler's box rest two round brooches, each about 1 1/4 inches in diameter. The accompanying label tells us that the pins are 18-carat gold castings from the artist's nipples.
3 These pieces — part homage, part parody — threaten to commodify works of the modernists referenced. One is a send-up of a public monument, the other the record of a private moment. Both pieces recall the past as a means to inhabit and interpret the present. The manner of doing so suggests a gendered and bifurcated practice of historical memory, in which men have monuments (history as overstatement) and women have moments (history as understatement). Depending upon one's perspective, they either render Stein and Picasso's legacies as ritual objects, or reduce their visions to trinkets (accolades or accessories). Either way, the pieces dramatize the extent to which the earlier artists such as Gertrude Stein continue to shape the interventions of contemporary conceptual and activist artists.
4 As such tributes attest, there can be little doubt that the influence of Stein's notions of interdigitation among systems of language, gender, and history continues to be felt as much as, if not more than, during her lifetime. Her ways of interrogating language and culture, which frequently found expression by means of a writing practice that embodied (rather than explicated) her theories, still have deep resonances for subsequent forms of conceptual art, especially those of feminist, language, and activist artists. In turn, contemporary conceptual artists extend Stein's project with their irreverent commentaries on androcentric thoughts, re-figurings of exclusionary historical narratives, and reframings of gendered speech.
5 While Stein's name may be highly recognizable today, she remains the modernist writer more often quoted than read, her words bandied about chiefly for their sharp wit and sententious quality. Who hasn't heard Stein's words invoked as soundbytes? Writer and critic Cynthia Ozick makes this point about Stein in her essay "Gertrude Stein: The Salonkeeper":
As a writer she is defined for us by only four quotations — egoless catch phrases, her logo and trademark: "Pigeons on the grass alas." "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." (Four roses; heavier brew than the three commonly cited.) To Ernest Hemingway, after World War I: "You're all a lost generation." On her deathbed: "What is the question?" (95)
Although literary luminaries Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker may be better celebrated for their spoken repartee, Gertrude Stein's body of work represents an inordinately rich contribution to the aphoristic legacy. Given, as she was, to peppering her prose with one-liners and waggish remarks, Stein's barbs constitute more than a playful sense of humor; taken together, they frame a trenchant criticism of the assumptions underlying many of American society's truisms and pieties. Even those who cite her scornfully prove themselves susceptible to Stein's power as an epigrammatist. Her sharp turns of language help readers recast customs of remark, judgment, and narrative.