Art History Edited

Disclaimer: this text takes a slightly disjointed form. What begins as a conventional review of Ian Burn: Collected Writings 1966-1993 (2024) shifts part way into an examination of the artist's modes of self-historicisation: autobiography, backdating, replication. Through this the text roughs out some ideas about the discourse, temporality, and commodification of 1960s avant-garde art for a future piece of writing. Owing to its dual aim, the present text could be split in two: a 'review' of Collected Writings, and an 'article' about backdating and replication in minimalist and conceptual art. This would probably improve readability, and make my treatment of the book and those art historical issues seem more even-handed (less paranoid). Yet as outlined below, the issues aren't easily disentangled from the book–a powerful narrative tool that advances the project of oeuvre formation and promotion undertaken by the artist in his lifetime. And, since no one has dictated Burn's posthumous existence more than the book's editor, Ann Stephen, my examination of Burn's oeuvre inevitably calls attention to her framing of it. The aim isn't to undermine Stephen's formidable research, foundational as it is to my own work, but to develop a critical reading of an artist once dubiously honoured as 'the only Australian ever to be central to an internationally significant art movement.'¹

Ian Burn (1939-1993) gained an international reputation in New York for works such as Mirror Piece (1967), a glass sheet framed against a mirror alongside notes and diagrams, and Undeclared Glasses (1967), glass sheets leaning near a wall-mounted text on their fragile status 'as art.'² Combining window and mirror forms with commentary on the objects' physical, perceptual, and semantic properties, these pieces heralded conceptual art's challenge to modernist modes of producing, distributing and consuming art. The presence of writing in, on, or as art confounded critics and fostered categorical insecurity between work and theory. Although composed in the scholastic style of analytic philosophy, Burn's conceptual art writings are aesthetic fragments, not self-sufficient theses. The inclusion of facsimile reproductions of these texts in Ian Burn: Collected Writings 1966-1993 (henceforth CW), edited by art historian and curator Ann Stephen and designed by Robert Milne, signals the importance of official-seeming graphic layouts to these early writings.³ The bureaucratic look of the printed page was part of Burn's argument.

The facsimiles attest to the cleverness of this much-anticipated anthology, which offers an unprecedented overview of Burn's career as writer and artist. It's long overdue. The last sizeable collection of his texts was Dialogue: Writings in Art History, a compilation of seventeen essays edited by Geoffrey Batchen in 1991, two years before Burn's untimely passing.⁴ Dialogue was a modest black and white hardback of 256 pages published by Allen & Unwin Australia. The new CW is more ambitious on all fronts. The meat of the book is forty-nine texts by Burn, each accompanied by a summary by Stephen, who has also penned a useful introduction and section outlines. Further inclusions are a 1994 text by the late Mel Ramsden and Michael Baldwin of Art & Language, the conceptual art collective with whom Burn forged his international reputation in the early 1970s, as well as Ian Burn Memorial Lectures from the late 1990s and early 2000s by artist-writers Adrian Piper, Ramsden, Allan Sekula, and Paul Wood. Triple the page-count of Dialogue and splendidly illustrated, the new book is slick. A transnational collaboration between Sydney's Power Publications, KW in Berlin, and König Books, Cologne, it ratifies Burn's posthumous migration from cult figure to main character in the story of conceptual art.

Described by Stephen as the 'companion volume' (p. 12) to her biography On Looking at Looking: The Art and Politics of Ian Burn (2007), CW isn't merely an essay collection but a minor history of conceptual art and its aftermath. It's indispensable reading for those interested in conceptual art, modernism, art historiography, union politics, and Australian art. Most of the texts were written in America, where Burn lived from 1967 till 1977, and Sydney, Australia where he resided until his death in 1993. One-third of these are collaboratively authored; they chart the mobile protagonist's shifting network of interests and alliances. The earliest text, a script for the unrealised 1966 audio installation Soft-Tape, was co-authored with his friend Ramsden in London, where Burn lived from late 1964 to July '67. After moving to New York in August 1967 his main collaborator remained Ramsden; indeed, half of the late '60s texts in the volume are joint efforts by I.B.M.R, as the duo sometimes credited their work (they also briefly worked with Roger Cutforth as The Society for Theoretical Art and Analysis). Documenting the young painter's reinvention as theoretician, the early texts are tinged with autodidactic self-seriousness. Nonetheless the sparse prose is phenomenologically attentive and methodologically sound. These qualities are evolving constants of Burn's work over his quarter-century career as a writer.

From 1971 until 1976 Burn worked with Ramsden and others including Joseph Kosuth as part of Art & Language (A&L) in New York, an offshoot of the Coventry-based conceptual art collective founded by Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Baldwin, and Harold Hurrell. The abstruseness of articles such as Burn and Ramsden's 'Problems of Art & Language space' (1972-73) were fuelled by a diet of analytic philosophy, anthropology, and the history and philosophy of science, as Stephen explains in one of her introductions. Despite, or perhaps because of A&L's theoretical difficulty and at times wilful impenetrability, its major transatlantic projects of the early 1970s formalised logico-linguistic models for group conversation, in for example the Indexes (1972-73), an elaborate card-file system. Efforts to this end are under-represented in CW due to the impossibility, Stephen explains in another introduction, of meaningfully extracting bits from these works' integrated structures.

It is a major achievement of Stephen's book that the reader can chronologically track Burn's intellectual development. Around 1973 the hermeticism of Burn's writings unspooled into strident Leftist polemics against cultural imperialism, formalist art history, and the market. In 'Provincialism' (1973) (otherwise called 'Art is what we do, culture is what we do to other artists,' a riff on the Carl Andre line 'Art is what we do, culture is what is done to us'), Burn railed against the U.S.'s world domination of avant-garde art. The presumption of art's ideological neutrality is false, he contended, a myth that 'guarantees American art a special autonomy and immunity to external criticism and even dialogue, while guaranteeing impotency of other contexts' (p. 211). Non-U.S. art was being measured against New York standards: the rules of the 'game' of art 'contain a trick ensuring all artists play by the American rules, while only Americans can win–and then not all Americans.' Although benefiting from the reproduction of centre-periphery relations, participants at the centre were not unaffected by cultural homogenisation, U.S. style; they too suffered from the non-dialogic conditions of production and attendant impoverishment of experience. The provincialism problem diagnosed by Burn has dispersed in the half-century since he wrote this paper; nonetheless, his interrogation of art's ideological function and the geographic distribution of art world power is an important precursor to globalist accounts of contemporary art.

Living in downtown Manhattan in the early 1970s, Burn encountered dealers and collectors such as Bruno Bischofberger, Daniel Templon, Nicholas Logsdail, Paul Maenz, and John Weber. Subsequently, his analysis of U.S. cultural imperialism developed into a critique of New York art business in the 1975 Artforum article, 'The Art Market: Affluence and Degradation,' which portrays the city's art scene as a disaffected circle-jerk driven by market demand for an 'endlessly innovative avant-garde.' Under these conditions '"high culture" has reified itself into a remote and dehumanising tradition,' Burn argues, the artist 'a trained and efficient economic unit' alienated from the luxury commodities they produce. The dire evaluation ends on a cautiously optimistic note about artists' recent attempts at self-organisation. Irrespective of the outcome of these collectivist experiments, he thought, they indicate 'a distinctive consciousness and solidarity developing out of a 'community of artists' seeking to effect political change.

A desire for social and political impact would soon propel Burn beyond art into the world of trade union activism, but in 1975 he was wholly absorbed in the world of Art & Language. April marked the launch of The Fox, a radical art journal founded by Kosuth and Sarah Charlesworth and edited by Kosuth, Charlesworth, Ramsden, Michael Corris, Preston Heller, Andrew Menard, and others affiliated with A&L New York, the membership of which momentarily ballooned to twenty or so. The Fox reflected the militancy of Burn's milieu relative to their British counterparts, and was partly an attempt by A&L N.Y. to distance themselves from the founders of the group. Whereas A&L U.K. activity was located in or in relation to a concept of autonomous art and the art world, the U.S. chapter increasingly pursued a more 'outward-looking' conceptual art, at the nexus of social and political projects. CW contains two of three articles Burn wrote for the inaugural Fox: a review of T.J. Clark and Linda Nochlin's books on French nineteenth-century painting, and an article offering a utopian counterproposal to the commercial system in 'Pricing Works of Art' (1975). Banning the sale of artworks might seem farfetched, but the negative effects of market speculation on art since the 1990s proves the merit of Burn's quasi-Stalinist vision if not in solution, then in its desperate search for one.

The argument is representative of Burn's shoot-from-the-hip Marxist tirades of the late 1970s, when frustration with art's political impotence boiled over into a dismissal of art in general. The antipodean's unabashed social agenda–his desire to effect change 'in the real world'–drew the ire of Michael Baldwin and A&L U.K. (which had recently lost Atkinson and Hurrell but gained among its members Philip Pilkington), who in the pages of A-L ridiculed Burn's call-to-arms rhetoric and valourisation of 'community.' Their fun-poking was promptly rebutted in The Fox 2. 'We don't need any more abstract rubbish about an abstract society,' Burn contended: A&L U.K. was 'too theoretical, too anti-practical, too self-doctrinal certainty, and far too dependent on leaving the writer's own problematic circumstances out of the picture.' (p. 289) The sophisticated argumentation of the Coventry mob, Baldwin in particular, was denigrated by Burn as 'a mockery, a world of scholarly luxury, isolated from real life practical consequences.' (p. 285) Art historian and A-L editor Charles Harrison, meanwhile, was accused of 'eloquent foot-shuffling,' 'true blue English do-nothingness.' (ibid.) The problem was one of theory's remoteness to praxis. A&L U.K. were lambasted accordingly as navel-gazing elitists, out-of-touch with 'the sometimes violent phenomenon of everyday conditions.'

Meanwhile in 1975, the New York branch was crumbling from within. Kosuth's refusal to subsume his individual authorship under the group moniker led to accusations of careerism, and was a source of ongoing tension. In-fighting was aggravated by another text in The Fox, a highlight of CW, Burn and Canadian artist-activist Karl Beveridge's savage diss of 'Don Judd' (1975). Sustaining a patronising second-person mode of address throughout–'Don Judd, is it possible to talk?,' it opens–the article attacked the veteran avant-gardist's institutional complicity:

Burn and Beveridge detected reactionary and imperialist elements in Judd's work that had gone unnoticed in phenomenological accounts of minimalist art. Their oedipal bashing was tactical, since the recipient happened to be Kosuth's mentor and stablemate at Leo Castelli Gallery–attacking the senior artist was a proxy assault on his protégé. Internal disputes had spilled into the art world at large. Group morale was terminal.

The chronological ordering of Burn's writings of the mid-1970s reveals his radicalisation in the period leading up to his 'art strike,' a period in which (for him) art production lost its justification and came to be seen as an obstruction to political engagement. 1976 was a turning point. A&L N.Y. and The Fox disbanded; Burn escaped New York for short-term teaching positions at University of California, San Diego, alongside Fred Lonidier, Allan Sekula, Phel Steinmetz, and Martha Rosler, then Halifax School of Art, Nova Scotia. Returning to New York in September, he departed the U.S. for Australia in January 1977.

Burn's final year in the U.S. is unrepresented in CW save for an obtuse one-and-a-half-page text co-authored with Red Krayola musician Mayo Thompson. Yet much clearly happened in his life and work immediately prior to his departure from the New York art world, and the book would benefit from a few documents to more comprehensively reconstruct his exit route. The inclusion of an article from Red Herring, for example, the radical newspaper Burn worked on with ex-Fox affiliates in 1976 that was first printed in January '77, would offer perspective on his journalistic style and politics. A June 1976 interview by Michael Auping in Long Beach, California, another text that didn't make the cut, captures Burn at his angriest and most alienated, and as such gives precious insight into his thinking on the brink of the mythic exodus. 'The artist is out on the social and cultural fringe with virtually no impact,' he ranted. 'You're free to be meaningless. You're free to have no voice.'⁵ Galleries are dismissed as 'quiet salons where ideological imperialism and pretentious aimlessness are carefully guarded as the seamless web of "Western culture."' The exasperated antipodean advocated the need to 'particularise an audience,' 'a specific community' such as 'a construction workers' union.' This is exactly what Burn did upon returning to Australia: give slide talks to trade unions on topics from uranium mining to aesthetic formalism, Donald Duck to political banner-making. For him art production had lost its justification and become an obstruction to political action.

Complaints about minor omissions shouldn't overshadow Stephen's overall achievement. She's given us an astutely edited volume of writings by a still-underrated artist framed by copious biographical data and art historical commentary. Certain exclusions are unavoidable: 'notebooks, lectures, slide talks, interviews, letters and transcribed conversations' were too numerous to include, Stephen explains. Nonetheless Burn's published interviews–most of which he edited himself, and should thus be treated as closely-worked documents of artistic self-display–are snapshots of the artist at decisive moments in his career. CW would benefit from the Long Beach as well as other interviews–he gave two on the cusp of joining A&L; another, shortly before his death, broaches the cultural condition of postmodernism and exhumation of conceptual art.⁶ These primary documents are more vital than the four Ian Burn Memorial Lectures by Piper, Sekula, Ramsden, and Wood that fill 90 pages of this already-heavy book. The latter texts and authors are worth reading, but the editorial inclusion of secondary commentary (other than the editor's own) only by renowned international contributors emits a faint yet distinct odour of provincialist insecurity that is prone to be misread as a betrayal of Burn's critique of that very construct.

Based in Sydney from 1977 until his death in 1993, Burn collaborated with Australian artists, art historians, and unionists including Stephen, Terry Smith, Ian Milliss, Nigel Lendon, Sandy Kirby, and Charles Merewether. The latter four sections of CW–on labour culture, landscape, the avant-garde, and perception–are devoted to Burn's writings over this sixteen-year period.

Back home Burn scrutinised Australian landscape painting through the lens of social art history. There are in the book texts on late nineteenth-century Heidelberg School painting (1980), 'Popular Melbourne Landscape Painting between the Wars' (1982), and an excerpt from National Life & Landscapes: Australian Painting 1900-1940 (1990). The landscape section features a 1992 essay co-written with Stephen on Albert Namatjira, an Arrente painter from the MacDonnell Ranges in Central Australia of the first half of the twentieth century. Dismantling the misconception that Namatjira slavishly copied the European style of the Hermannsburg School espoused by his mentor Rex Battarbee, Burn and Stephen argue that Namatjira was 'trying on a mask,' mimicking (not assimilating) a foreign optic. They contend that his work–the lurid watercolours as well as the 'kitsch' decorated woomeras and boomerangs–orchestrates a clash of Western and Indigenous visuality, a so-called 'double vision' that by 'disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse ... also disrupts its authority' (p. 488). The Australian landscape genre was historically a white nationalist self-image premised on Aboriginal dispossession, they explain, that is disturbed by Namatjira's Aboriginality (p. 478) as much as the contained compositionality and multi-focality of his pictures, which suffuse the colonial gaze of the outback typical of naturalist and modernist landscapes with ancient knowledge (pp. 479-484).

Buttressed by the postcolonial criticism of Homi Bhabha and his subaltern studies ilk, 'Namatjira's white mask' testifies to an intersection between Burn's thought and postmodernism, the hegemonic intellectual dispensation of the late 1980s. At this time, concurrent to the commencement of his Namatjira research with Stephen, Burn was edging back towards the contemporary art world. Bhabha's concept of mimicry illuminates Namatjira's work but also Burn's own shapeshifting: his aping of the jargon of officialdom and authority as a conceptual artist, his reinvention as a trade union journalist, and subsequent malingering in the domain of art history–the topic to which I now turn.

Filed amongst the writings on landscape is a 1985 essay, 'Is Art History Any Use to Artists?,' the chief concern of which is the difference between how artists and academics think about art history. The text is autobiographically coded. While he seldom mentioned it explicitly, for Burn the task of self-historicisation was pressing–especially during what would be his final years, when he channelled copious energy into chronicling his minimalist and conceptual art. This was necessary, he observed in 1988, because 'artists survive beyond their art through art history, so histories still have to be written as if they mattered, a matter of life and death.' (p. 537) An exchange of letters at that time with Charles Harrison (not in CW) affords crucial insight into Burn's self-historicising agenda. When questioned by Harrison about his 'concern' for his 'place in history,' Burn shot back: 'Are you saying that, as an artist, it's not my job to take responsibility for my own "history"?' He declares elsewhere in the letter: 'Art history is always accompanied by "background noise"'; in his case, 'dealing with the art market after a lapse of more than ten years, [and] with having to invent a plausible story to accompany [his minimalist and conceptual] art' were sources of such noise. 'Sure, all history is a kind of fiction and so on, but when it comes to one's own it's also got a lot to do with how one can get out of bed every morning.'⁷ For Burn the production of one's own history was an existential requirement, a way of maintaining mental health.

Burn was right about 'background noise'–art history is never pure, is always saturated with the interests and intentions of its makers. His own writings from 'Is Art History Any Use to Artists?' were part of a sustained effort to construct an art historical profile for his then little-known work in the protracted lead-up to Ian Burn: Minimal-Conceptual Work, 1965-1970 (1992-93), a partial retrospective at Perth's Art Gallery of Western Australia (A.G.W.A.) that toured the east coast of Australia. Minimal-Conceptual Work hailed Burn's arrival as a significant artist distinct from A&L, with a biographical and stylistic narrative of his own. Officially curated by John Stringer, the exhibition was actually led by the artist, who authored the project outline, oversaw the hang, edited the catalogue, and with Brisbane dealer Peter Bellas negotiated the 1988 sale to A.G.W.A. of fifteen works that formed the crux of the show.

Having delineated some key moments and themes of CW, the next section of this review will concentrate on one main topic: the inextricable relation, forged in the lead up to Minimal-Conceptual Work, between the art historical profile of Burn's 1960s art and his writings of the 1980s and '90s. Illustrating his arguments about minimalism and conceptual art, Burn's own artworks were valuable 'finds' that legitimated his standing as an art historian; meanwhile, those same writings were pivotal to his emergence as a significant artist distinct from A&L, with a biographical and stylistic narrative of his own. In pursuing this topic I shall continue to draw on the new book, but will veer away from a strict 'review' format into unpublished archival material in the hope of uncovering aspects of Burn's practice beyond the frame of his own writings, and of Stephen's commentaries as well.

Scholarly inattention to this artist's feat of self-historicisation can be partly attributed to the misconception that his work hermetically interprets itself. Burn's writing about 1960s art seems hermeneutically unassailable on account of its plausibility as primary and secondary document, testimony and analysis. But that visage of interpretative closure is the incidental accretion of purposive activities undertaken by the artist–and as such is dismantlable. In what follows, I explore the formation of Burn's historicising agenda in the heady context of the 1960s avant-garde, a decade in which to be an artist was, he later recalled, to 'produce "history."' (p. 500)

The imperative drove Burn's art and ideas, also his career craft, in a myriad of ways beyond the modernist purview of studio practice and into the curation of exhibitions, photographic documentation of art, self-publishing of pamphlets and catalogues, even the backdating of certain artworks. Serving contextualising, evidentiary, and promotional functions, these activities register the young artist's self-awareness as a potential object of history. Operating outside the gallery system in the late 1960s, Burn's immediate interlocutors were his small network of artist peers. Yet his urgent efforts to record and disseminate his art indicates that the absence of a real audience was immaterial: his work was addressed to spectators of the future.

When Burn 'rediscovered' his minimalist and conceptual art twenty-five years later, he clothed it in new words and sentences. His commentaries coincided with his reproductions or replicas of certain historical works–with this, Burn modified the historicity not only of the minimalist car-paint monochromes Blue Reflex (1966-67), around which much of the below discussion coheres, but his entire corpus of Minimal-Conceptual Works. Yet the reproductions go largely unmentioned in Burn's published writings, and have since been ignored by Stephen, with CW being no exception. Her apparent indifference to Burn's program of artwork replication (and indeed his method of artwork dating) is baffling–it is as though the artist's circumvention of these topics disqualifies them for Stephen as worthy objects of speculation. Nonetheless, Burn's canny manoeuvring in art history must be addressed if his caper of self-mythologisation is to be understood.

'Reflections on the Avant-Garde,' the section of the collection devoted to texts about 1960s art written between 1981 and 1993, is where Burn can be seen constructing a discursive context for his minimalist and conceptual work. The section starts with the 1981 essay 'The 1960s: Crisis and Aftermath,' originally published with the subtitle '(or the Memoirs of an Ex-Conceptual Artist).' This solid early history of conceptual art is known for importing the term 'deskilling' into art discourse; it is also fascinating for its remarks on the self-historicising impulse of the 1960s avant-garde. During that decade, Burn recalled, 'success as an artist implied more than ever that one did not merely produce "good art" but that one had to produce "history"... By conceiving of one's work as "instant art history," one necessarily conceives of oneself as merely an object of that history–not as a thinking, acting subject' (p. 500). The topic under discussion was the intensification of '"art historical" consciousness' among American '60s artists, for whom art history was conceived as a 'narrow lineage of styles.'

Naïve as it may seem, for Burn, in London and then New York, each formal 'breakthrough' was experienced as a small step forward in the unfolding of world art historical consciousness. An unpublished note from 1966-67 (not in CW), Burn's earliest stab at historiography, sets forth a crudely teleological conception: 'Historical development can be thought of in terms of expanding consciousness (since each awareness breeds greater awareness)–or in an increased awareness of sensitivity.'⁸ Burn gave the example of an Impressionist painting, which he claimed 'is simply so much more aware, i.e. that the artist is far more sensitive and aware, than a Renaissance painting.' His account continues:

This sort of homespun historicism underpinned Burn's belief that artworks reflect the advancement of self-consciousness. To make 'instant art history' was to push 'awareness' into new frontiers, an objective harmonious with 'the historical drive of modernist smart moves' that Ramsden later identified in his pal's Mirror Pieces.⁹

In Burn's 1981 essay the term 'instant art history' is set in scare-quotes to underscore the art historical, or art historicising, ambitions of 1960s artists, rather than to attribute art historical value or canonical status to their work. Burn's own activities abroad pre-A&L illustrates this distinction well. Departing Melbourne in late 1964 as a young painter dreaming of 'making it' on the stage of history, he didn't exhibit in Europe or America until 1970. Much of his art from those years was unknown and unexhibited, and would remain invisible, until Minimal-Conceptual Work.¹⁰ The figure of the marginal artist recuperated by art history is commonplace; what is remarkable about Burn's oeuvre is the inseparability of the art-becoming-historical from the artist's own historical writings about the art. I cannot think of an artist whose retrospective commentary on their work configured its art historical reception to the same extent. Rendering his art as art history, Burn's writings brought to fruition the ambitions of his younger self, whose aesthetic remnants went public contemporaneously to and precisely because of his middle-aged commentary. In elucidating the syndrome of 'instant art history,' his 1960s art instantly became art history–in the late '80s. At once a relentless campaign of self-promotion waged discreetly and a post-conceptual program of baroque sophistication, Burn's art historical reification was cemented via his exegetical demythologisation of the art.

It follows that Burn's writings about his own art aren't straightforward history, as he alerted Harrison in 1988: 'any art history "mirrored" in that writing is largely autobiographical.'¹¹ CW attests that his texts fluctuate in levels of self-reference. 'The Re-appropriation of Influence,' the 1988 piece espousing the importance of art historical survival (cited above), is obliquely autobiographical. Borrowing from two earlier texts Burn wrote on Sidney Nolan, 'Re-appropriation' is arranged around three watershed cultural moments that also decisively impacted his artistic trajectory. The first of these moments is the 1940s work of Nolan, a formative influence on Burn's youthful forays into modernist picture-making. The second is the breakdown of modernism in the 1960s and '70s, his artistic coming-of-age and avant-garde involvement. Third is 1980s postmodernism, a zeitgeist of stylistic eclecticism and grand-narrative revisionism, also the time in which Burn wrote this roaming historical narrative.

The autobiographism of the essay is encoded in its opening line: 'Over the past two decades, conditions have been created which allow for a particular rereading (and revaluing) of much of the art of the past century.' These two decades span the author's career, from minimalism to its second coming. Self-reference threads to a 'problem' raised a few lines later: 'the need to consider how particular historical circumstances have constructed the potential for a rereading,' which, he thought, demanded a reassessment of 'the artistic practices (including critical and theoretical writing) identified as sources for the attitudes prevalent at the end of the twentieth century.' Burn recursively called for analysis of the kind undertaken in his very article. The topics covered–Antipodean spatiality, the imperialism of minimalist and conceptual art and those movements' ideological consonance with institutions, as well as postmodernist pluralism, its scrambled centres and peripheries, revisionism–are pulled tight around the contours and concerns of his own career.

Burn fashioned an ad hoc historiography, replotting canons of modernism. Inevitably, he drew on his own experiences; his own art, from origins to re-appropriation, was central. Whereas 'Re-appropriation' obliquely reflected its author, 'Glimpses: On Peripheral Vision,' a 1990 essay 'assembled from ... [his] old notes, recent lectures, reviews and catalogue statements' (p. 549), is blatantly autobiographic. Writing in first person past tense, Burn used his artworks to illustrate period notions of perception, language, and materiality, in the process planting those marginal remnants within an A-list constellation of Johns, LeWitt, Ramsden, Robbe-Grillet, and Wittgenstein. The text was originally published in Dialogue, the 1991 release of which cemented Burn's reputation as an art historian as well as a major artist of the '60s. The release of the book a year before the Minimal-Conceptual Work exhibition meant that, for most of Burn's audience, the exegesis preceded the art.

'Glimpses' collated material from an informal string of lectures on 1960s art that Burn gave in the five or so years leading up to Minimal-Conceptual Work. The script for one such lecture, 'Blue Reflex,' delivered 1 May 1991 at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane is published in CW for the first time. An account of one of his auto-lacquered reflective monochromes Blue Reflex (1966-67), Burn's aim was 'to recover and reveal the embeddedness of the object–and to open up some of the different ways in which it's embedded,' 'to give a grand tour of the contextuality of a single work.' Stops along the way included Klein, Rauschenberg, Stella, Judd, McCracken, Baldwin, Ramsden, and Nolan. Elite company indeed for 'poor old Blue Reflex,' a work scarcely known at the time of the lecture.¹²

The role of Burn's writings in catalysing the reception of his art is, I have been arguing, worthy of analysis. As it turns out, the artist's retrospective effect on his art by his writing surfaces, albeit abstrusely, in the 'Blue Reflex' lecture. The argument proceeds from an initial observation that Blue Reflex is a 'simple, mute, hermetic object which fits comfortably into the late modernist ethos of the mid 1960s.' After outlining the modernist character of the Reflex and that object's implied 'decontextualisation... through idealised institutional forms,' Burn posits a trio of questions: 'What kind of object does this become if we recontextualise it? What happens when we reveal its contingency? Can an object like this operate in the real world?' (p. 575) These questions hang over the lecture, but what they refer to is unclear–they seemingly bear less on Blue Reflex per se than its meta-position in Burn's self-historicising operation. Is the 'this' the modernist object (in general) or Blue Reflex (in particular)? And who or what is carrying out the 'recontextualisation'? Is Burn referring to the hermeneutic act undertaken in the 1991 lecture? Or is the recontextualisation of the modernist object enacted by Blue Reflex in the late '60s?

The original dot matrix-printed lecture script (slightly different to the version in CW) bears a faint pencilled correction that clears up the confusion: 'What kind of object does this Blue Reflex become if we recontextualised it?' It names Blue Reflex directly and thereby clarifies that the questions at the top of Burn's paper are formulations of general art historical problems he was addressing, not descriptions of the painter himself in the late 1960s. By privileging the unannotated version of the script, Stephen inadvertently obscures its meaning. Yet seen another way, her edit merely exacerbates an already-present confusion in the lecture between Blue Reflex as historical artefact and banal thing, which flares up again on its final page (p. 582).

After observing that Blue Reflex's modernism limits its functionality outside the art world, Burn concludes by 'acknowledging' how this limitedness continues to shape its everyday being. (What kind of non-modernist functionality does he envision for art?) This is expressed through the retelling of an event (or recurrence of events, as implied by present continuous tense) relating to the restoration of the artwork at the auto spray shop. For Burn the limitedness of Blue Reflex becomes apparent in his conversation with the automotive painter, to whom he successfully misrepresents the painting as a 'display panel' rather than 'artwork.' Proof of the work's modernism is its unrecognisability as art to the tradesman–this is the precondition for his declassification of Blue Reflex as art.

For all the strangeness of the auto shop anecdote, one thing it communicates is that Burn wilfully misled the paint technician. His behaviour is playful; it also reveals a propensity for deception, spreading disinformation. Burn's non-disclosure of Blue Reflex's art status to the worker prompts the question of whether he would mislead his art audience. For the yarn rouses paranoia in the reader. Would this artist-cum-art historian dare withhold information from us?

This is not a rhetorical but historical question, the consideration of which prompts a detour from CW into evidence that Burn misled his audience about Blue Reflex prior to the 1991 lecture. Even though he dated the series in 1966-67, a date universally adopted by museums and historians, his date-stamped correspondence–a reliable indicator of the order in which key events unfolded in Burn's life and work in London and New York–proves an alternative timeline.¹³ To my knowledge (which is limited–see conclusion), there is no mention in London of Blue Reflex or anything resembling it in letters, notes, or photographs. Its closest progenitor is Blue Premiss (1966-67), an acrylic on canvas composition of modular rectangles articulated through the contrast between gloss and matte surface.¹⁴ Following his transatlantic migration in July 1967, there was a period of artistic inactivity. A letter Burn sent his Melbourne artist friend Paul Partos on 20 November 1967 states: 'my painting doesn't exist–I have stretched and prepared some canvas but that is all, I haven't begun to think about the state of my work when I recommence painting.'¹⁵ The letter proves that Burn hadn't at that time produced any art in New York. His expressed desire to paint is noteworthy because it contradicts his story in subsequent interviews of instantly losing his motivation to paint after moving to the city, discussed below. The same letter discredits the 'October 1967' inscription (this was likely added later) on the verso of one Reflex in the estate. It's improbable that the production of the series commenced in the last weeks of 1967 either: as well as working full-time in a picture-framing factory, he was exploring the new city with his wife Avril and renovating their apartment. Further decreasing the time and space needed for art making was the mid-November arrival of Ramsden, who the Burns hosted for a month, and the 'silly season' (Burn) from Christmas into the New Year.

The earliest mention in Burn's correspondence of artistic activity in New York is March 1968.¹⁶ He appears to have purchased a spray-gun and compressor in mid-1968; a 16 June letter to Partos describes his switch from canvas to plywood, gesso to fibreglass, acrylic to auto lacquer, and paintbrush to airgun. He still hadn't mastered the new gear. Two months later the series was ongoing, a letter to his parents confirms:

To the extent that spray technology (and technique) is indispensable to Blue Reflex, the date of the series (if it is to be meaningful) surely could not precede his experimentation with the spray-gun. Further evidence of the 1968 making of Blue Reflex is found in a bundle of papers Burn mailed the National Gallery, Melbourne for The Field exhibition (1968). Among several pages of artwork reports is Blue Reflex, 'March 1968'–a date supplied to the museum by the artist. The listing of 'shellac' as a material, a type of varnish not used in any extant Blue Reflex, which (with the exception of the early acetate-coated grey Reflex in the estate) are uniformly automotive lacquer on epoxy-coated plywood, hints that in March the work wasn't yet resolved. Further evidence of the beleaguered production of the Reflexes is an undated notebook entry about a 'Failed Blue Reflex:' 'Planned accidents / random reflexions;–still unresolved whether I can accept unplanned accidents to the existing planned accidents.'¹⁸ The making of the series started in 1968 and dragged on, not always to plan, late into the year.

A comprehensive investigation of Burn's manner of dating artworks in the late 1960s is beyond the scope of the present review. Suffice to say, after arriving in New York he soon adopted a method of dating artworks to their conception (rather than execution, as is customary). Popularised by minimalists dating their artworks to the blueprint or sketch, the approach was pushed further by Kosuth, who dated his aptly named Protoinvestigations '1965,' at which time he possessed neither the means nor space to realise them. Works from the series were first sighted at Lannis Gallery in February '67 but the date-tag '1965' was justified, Kosuth thought, because his work inheres in the 'concept' not the 'object': the earliness of the date clocks the earliness of the thought. Kosuth's dubious dates became a source of art world controversy when 'called out' by Benjamin Buchloh in the catalogue for L'Art Conceptuel, Une Perspective (1989), an overview of conceptual art at Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris that included Burn's Mirror Piece and Xerox Book in the A&L section (credited as 'Art & Language').¹⁹ 'Nice news,' Burn sneered in a letter to Ramsden after hearing about the exposure of his old foe Kosuth's backdating.²⁰ Burn meanwhile was never publicly accused of unfairly backdating his work, nor did he voluntarily discuss his manner of dating or backdating artworks.²¹ The closest he came was a note scrawled shortly before his death about Kosuth's backdating of the Protoinvestigations:

Burn's critique fixes on Kosuth's distortion of the timeline of 1960s art–the conditions for conceptual art, he argues, which grew out of minimalism, hadn't yet emerged in 1965 or 1966. Those conditions had emerged by 1967, with the first sightings of Kosuth's Protoinvestigations–also the year Burn assigned to his Mirror Piece. This is relevant to the present discussion because the tagging of that work '1967' offers a motive for the '1966-67' of Blue Reflex.

Mirror Piece was dated 1967 but produced a year or so later. Burn's correspondence establishes that the materialisation of the first mirrors overlaps with Blue Reflex in 1968. Their synchronicity is logged in a 14 May letter to Partos: 'at present I am working in two processes–the mirror pieces and paintings.'²³ Modelling a linear development from minimalism to conceptual art, Blue Reflex to Mirror Piece, Burn's dates seem historical in the sense of historically realistic. In fact, these dates obfuscate the coterminous production of Blue Reflex and Mirror Piece. Their synchronicity is captured in a photograph of Burn's home studio that accompanies his 'Blue Reflex' lecture (p. 579) in CW, dated 1967. The image features a pair of Mirror Pieces hung alongside a pair of Reflexes, the tins, rags, brush, tape, sandpaper, and newspaper on the floor–signs of the artistic labour that brought these paintings into being. There is every chance that the camera-operator was the artist, contemplating his gleaming new productions. Stephen's acceptance of Burn's dates, however, throws off the accuracy of the caption. The image couldn't be from 1967 because the depicted works didn't yet exist (same goes for captions on pages 573 and 574); it was most likely taken in 1968.

To my mind the dates for the Mirror Piece or Pieces have always lacked clarity. Burn's correspondence from February and March 1968 is the earliest evidence of the material existence of these works that I've seen. In August 1968 Two Glass/Mirror Piece and Four Glass/Mirror Piece (the 'two' and 'four' in their respective titles refers to quantities of glass sheets in front of the mirror) were fabricated in Melbourne at Partos' father's framing shop, G. & H. Partos, then exhibited in The Field, dated 1968. Burn also mailed the museum a dossier of notes and diagrams; he hadn't yet decided on a suitable display format, but wished to exhibit certain pages with the mirrors. However, Burn's plan was rejected by curator John Stringer (the Stringer of Minimal-Conceptual Work twenty-four years later) due to his belief that the material was merely preparatory or supplementary. Ultimately, that material wasn't mounted on the gallery wall but was, supposedly, available at the gallery desk.²⁴ Unsupported by notes and diagrams, the 1968 mirrors might be thought of as primitive versions of the now iconic Mirror Piece–a mirror alongside a row of thirteen pages. (Conceivably, the curatorial refusal of the theory inspired its later integration into the work.) The Field mirrors seem less advanced due to the absence of 'theory' on the wall; on the other hand, since the now iconic version of Mirror Piece (with thirteen pages of notes and diagrams) incorporates only a single pane of glass (technically a One Glass/Mirror Piece), it could be argued that the 1968 mirrors with their numerical references to 'two' and 'four' are variants of an essential Mirror Piece, conceived in 1967. Though this seems far-fetched.

A related question concerns the timing of the conception and production of the Mirror Piece with thirteen pages, one titled 'Further Notes (1968).' When was the work conceived of, and when finalised? The affixation of notes to the work was Burn's 'smart move,' but the Mirror Piece reproduced in the self-photocopied compendium Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden: Collected Works 1964-1971 (1971) as well as Ursula Meyer's edited book of artist profiles and documentation Conceptual Art (1972), is 1-6 Glass/Mirror Piece (six mirrors in a row) with only two pages. The six-and-two appears to be a rudimentary version of the now canonical Mirror Piece (the fact that I can't locate any extant versions of that six-and-two version adds weight to that theory).²⁵ The non-appearance of the thirteen-page version of the work in these publications is bewildering–why wouldn't the artist opt for the more evolved version of his work?

To its detriment CW doesn't anywhere address gaps and inconsistencies of this kind in Burn's dates, which results in regrettable captioning errors. For example, on the same page as the image of the double pair Mirror Piece-Blue Reflex is an archival image of Burn shaving in front of Mirror Piece (1-6 Glass/Mirror Piece with two pages of notes), the photographer (Ramsden) visible in mirror reflection. Again, the photograph couldn't be from 1967, as captioned, because the work didn't yet exist–though in this case, nor was the photo taken in 1968 (when the work maybe existed). The giveaway is an unassuming object lying on the table: the French magazine VH 101, which ran from 1970 to 1972. It looks to be the third, conceptual art-themed issue of Autumn 1970, the cover grey with orange text.²⁶

Burn made Blue Reflex in 1968 and the annotated version of Mirror Piece in 1968 at the earliest, but they weren't exhibited–nor were they publicly dated. The '1968' date-tagging of the Mirror Pieces in The Field confirms that Burn didn't initially backdate his work to the moment of conception; he likely picked up the tactic from Kosuth directly, with whom he became acquainted in July 1969.²⁷ After Burn organised an exhibition for Kosuth in October at Pinacotheca, Melbourne, the pair developed a productive working relationship around Art-Language that soon led to their co-curation of Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects at the New York Cultural Centre in April 1970, which Stephen has framed as 'a back-stage coup to stage [the] first museum exhibition of conceptual art in New York.'²⁸ Being first was almost a matter of life and death. In mid-1970 Burn informally advised Ursula Meyer on her Conceptual Art. His pages in the resulting 1972 publication include an image of Mirror Piece (1-6 Glass/Mirror Piece with two pages), dated 1967, the artist-photographer visible in reflection. The artwork, artist's clothing, and apartment setting confirm that the image is from the same photoshoot as that of Burn shaving in front of the mirror (reproduced in CW), taken at earliest Autumn 1970.

Proof of arcane experiments in private apartments, photo-documentation permitted the public circulation of conceptual art in slide or print form. Another publicity tool utilised by Burn was the interview; twice in 1970, he narrated his progression from minimal painting to conceptual art, laying the groundwork for the dates for Blue Reflex and Mirror Piece. Talking with Hazel de Berg, he stated: 'my initial reaction in coming to New York [in July 1967] was that I did not make any more paintings / stopped painting.'²⁹ It sounds as though he stopped painting immediately–which we know is not the case (if Blue Reflex counts as painting). The tale continues: 'I initially then started working again with materials such as glass and mirrors... It was at this stage,' he adds, 'in 1967, that I first started making the mirror pieces which were exhibited in The Field–in 1968.' In another 1970 interview, Burn again claimed to have stopped painting in 1967; and that his last paintings were 'monochrome mirror-like surfaces.'³⁰ Again, the date of the Reflexes was wound back a year.

Honours of precedence or leadership supposedly didn't matter to the fifty-four-year-old Burn, but they were coveted by his former self, a brazen avant-gardist who doubtless shared more in common with Kosuth than he later cared to admit. For the American artist, backdating authorised precedence; for the Australian it quelled the anxiety of belatedness: the '1967' dating of Mirror Piece brought it closer to '1965'). And, to make the 1967 label more convincing, a developmental narrative was concocted backwards from Mirror Piece to Blue Reflex: the conceptual object condemned the minimalist painting to the past. The '1967' of Mirror Piece dictated the '1966-67' of Blue Reflex because it debuted first: in the photocopied compendium Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden: Collected Works 1964-1971 (1971), then in Meyer's Conceptual Art.³¹ Gallery-wise, after showing at Daniel Templon, Paris in October 1971, Mirror Piece became a 'hit on the conceptual art circuit in the early 1970s–instant, or near-instant, art history.'³² Meanwhile, Blue Reflex remained unexhibited. Apart from the Reflex sold to Bischofberger in late 1971 (the only one sold before 1988), the series languished in obscurity.³³

Once Burn made the 'smart move' of putting pages next to his mirrors, Blue Reflex must have suddenly seemed out-of-date, a relic. In the Minimal-Conceptual Work catalogue Ramsden recalled that minimalism's expiry already seemed imminent, for him and Burn, in London: 'In 1967 there seemed to be no possibility of a progression from minimalism... [Burn's London] paintings became like minimalist seconds.'³⁴ This accords with Burn's recollection: 'Mel and I had "invented" our own version of Minimalism in London, without seeing any of the actual works... But it was a version which opened itself to a more "conceptualised" way of working–by the time we saw actual Minimal work, it would have been a "retrograde" step to give that kind of priority to materials and to form.'³⁵ However, Burn's retrospective account clashes with his June 1968 letter reporting that he had recently kitted himself up. In that letter he professed: 'most of the interesting present work for me is from guys making objects, like Morris and Judd, Smithson, LeWitt, and particularly Carl Andre.' The fact that Burn was upgrading his materials and equipment for Blue Reflex in 1968 and endorsing minimalist artists indicates that his memory of minimalism's exhaustion in '67 is misleading.

Burn critiqued Kosuth's distortion of the timeline of 1960s art, but his backdating of Blue Reflex generates distortive effects of its own. Beyond its unalignment with the phase of material experimentation charted in Burn's letters, the problem with '1966-67' is its occlusion of the possibility that the series was shaped by events of 1968, the year of its making. This opens the door for readings of the entwinement of Blue Reflex in the social and political, also artistic, upheavals of that fabled year. A likely reference for Blue Reflex was Donald Judd (1968) at the Whitney, a show that included industrially fabricated sculptures sprayed in Harley Davidson metal-flake gloss enamel. Stephen has previously argued that Burn's use of royal blue auto lacquer was 'prompted by seeing other New York artists making work with "bright automobile lacquers containing metal flake, which are reflective and emphasise the surface."'³⁶ Here she quotes Judd's catalogue text for 7 Sculptors at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (1965-66). However, Stephen's agreement with Burn's 1966-67 date-tag prevents her from considering the relation between Blue Reflex's auto-vehicular materiality and Judd's Whitney exhibition, which ran from 27 February till 24 March 1968. Burn's original date for Blue Reflex, March 1968, implies an intimate correlation between the series and Judd's exhibition–his unconventional inclusion of the month in the date-tag might even be seen as an acknowledgment of Judd's influence.

Presumably a critical art history addresses itself not only to the 'who,' 'what,' 'how,' and 'why,' but also 'when.' Ascertaining the date of an artwork is a basic task of the discipline that tells of a work's historicity, its specificity, its historical specificity, clarifies authenticity and provenance. Date identification is a matter of 'epistemic adequacy,' Burn might have said; it grounds our perception of the object. Blue Reflex illustrates this. Whereas sliding its date from 1968 rearwards to 1966-67 results in a loss of sources and context, acknowledging the work's actual date gives insight into the contingent unfolding of Burn's practice.

My re-examination of Burn's dates is more than a matter of 'correcting the record.' In the case of Blue Reflex (also Mirror Piece) the interpretative implications of the one-year distortion are perhaps less significant than the backdating act itself as a mode of oeuvre formation. Burn's doctoring of the record reflects a conceptual artists' equation of earliness and value. For them backdating was a value-adding exercise, a way of concocting precedence. Calendrical markers were cunningly pushed back from production to conception, a mental event that cannot be forensically disproven; sometimes even further. In general backdating registers the acute historical self-consciousness of conceptual artists, for whom assigning a date to an artwork, writing its caption, was intrinsic to the production process. For Burn, Kosuth, and Ramsden, among others, 'the caption' was a form of writing to be used, in concert with other genres such as essays, interviews, certificates, and proceedings, often accompanied by photographs, to manage one's public profile.³⁷ Backdating thus shouldn't be understood merely as a perversion of history: it is a technique that possesses its own history, ingrained in the phenomena of minimalist and conceptual art.

This brings us back to Burn's 1991 'Blue Reflex' lecture with greater understanding of the crafted historicity of these paintings–dated once, then redated to fit a narrative of 1960s avant-garde art. The lecture intensified the artist's earlier efforts to mould an art historical profile for Blue Reflex, which for a long time came to nothing. Wrapped in storage, the Reflexes didn't exist in any public capacity until their 'rediscovery' by Burn the art historian in the lead-up to Minimal-Conceptual Work–almost as though the process of historicisation itself produced the artwork. It is thus unsurprising that the painting's ontological categorisation is a cryptic theme of the 1991 lecture. Burn's withholding of the aesthetic identity of Blue Reflex from the technical worker, his swapping one name (painting) for another (display panel), is the closing act in a story of an object migrating between categories, its metamorphosis through renaming.

Thought experiment: invert the terms of Burn's closing act. In this scenario, the non-artist would transport a non-artwork into the art world and declare: 'I always tell them it is a work of art.' Mirrored, the anecdote revolves around the construal of the non-artwork as work of art; unmirrored, the artist transports an artwork outside the art world and declares that it isn't art. Either way, Blue Reflex is located at the border of 'painting' and 'object.' Burn's lesson, though, is not that a banal thing can become an artwork or, conversely, that an artwork can be stripped of its status as such. Rather, it's that the artist's actions long after the finalisation of an artwork can transform and even reverse its function or meaning–and that orchestrating this sort of Duchampian transformation might, by extension, be thought of as artistic labour. Burn dramatised this last point through the anecdotal restoration of Blue Reflex, a work which, he argued, 'confound[s] the integrity of the object.' (p. 582) The outsourced paint job, as he was aware, hyper-confounds the modernist integrity of the work by tampering with its physical constitution and negating the already-negated 'painter's touch.' Is it such a leap to imagine Burn ordering not only the restoration but the production of an entirely new Blue Reflex? Whether replica, reconstruction, or fake–no family of objects more egregiously confounds the integrity of the modernist object more than the Reproduction.

The history of Burn's restoration and replication of his Minimal-Conceptual Work in the late 1980s and early '90s is unaccounted for. One searches in vain through the editorial commentary of CW, or indeed any of Stephen's writings, for any mention of it. In Burn's writings, 'Blue Reflex' is the lone published mention of restoration; the only reference to reconstructing an artwork is found in the text for Soft-Tape, an unrealised 1966 installation that debuted at the 1990 Sydney Biennale:

Burn frames art history as a 'special effect,' and likens the ageing of ideas in his now-historical artwork to that of a physical object. 'Yellowed and cracked' also alludes to the material degradation of his own minimalist paintings after two decades in storage. Rolled up in cardboard tubes and sent to Ramsden's mother's house in suburban Melbourne, many of the London canvases had deteriorated. So too the Reflexes and various other works. The problem warranted its own labour of 'historical artifice': restoration, but also the production of new iterations of old works.

Beyond the mentions above, restoration and reproduction are not explored in Burn's texts in CW. He did raise these matters behind the scenes, though, with museum staff. In correspondence with A.G.W.A. in 1987-88 he discussed plans to restore as well as reproduce damaged, fragile, and inaccessible works–including Blue Reflex. He wrote of 'reconstructions (to be displayed as reconstructions),' 'works which are readily replicated,' 'travelling replicas' and 'special versions,' and claimed to 'like the idea of doing an exhibition which has very few "original" works in it and is largely reconstructed–and for this to make no difference to the art.'³⁸ The updated version of the Minimal-Conceptual Work outline mailed in May 1989 to collector Ghislain Mollet-Vieville explained that

The difference between original and copy, Burn might have reasoned, was effaced due to what aesthetician Nelson Goodman terms the 'allographic' (the non-autographic or non-handmade) character of much of his art: the flat taped lines of Blue Premiss, the anonymous planes of Mirror Piece, the copy-machine reproducibility of Xerox Book.⁴⁰ The notion of the allographic equally applies to Blue Reflex, a pictorial experiment with 'reproducibility' from its title derived from a standard colour in the print industry, its sprayed and buffed Reo Trucks paint, its serial production, to its mirroring of the spectator. Negating familiar signs of the painter's touch, a Reflex can be copied without degradation, the knock-off identical to the original.⁴¹

Original or copy, a Blue Reflex is (or should be) 'schmick,' its hi-gloss surface immaculate. The artist's instructions, attached to the back of the A.G.N.S.W. Reflex, are that the

Despite the allographic character of the Reflexes, writers have repeatedly emphasised their handmadeness–the residues of paint and silicon on the plywood edges, they argue, is evidence of the artist's work. In his long essay in the Minimal-Conceptual Work catalogue, closely edited by Burn, Michiel Dolk interpreted the messy edges of the Reflexes as indicating 'the materiality and studio-specificity of painting in archaeological cross-section.'⁴³ Stephen likewise has read the paint runoff as a clue to the artist's exertions: 'Only the thick edge, which exposes layers of plywood, indicates his manual labour.'⁴⁴ She quotes the artist's comment in his Brisbane lecture that when making the work in the late 1960s he 'couldn't get rid of the feeling that art had to be labour-intensive, on some skilled level.' (p. 578) The outsourced replication of Blue Reflex complicates these art historical fetishisations of the artist's spraying and polishing of these paintings (it also explains the clean edges of certain boards, and varying degrees of patination). It seems absurd to ignore Burn's restorations and replicas while valorising his handmaking of the originals–an elision of what is most remarkable about Blue Reflex: its radical inauthenticity by traditional standards. Professionally fabricated replicas (shop-made after hand-sprayed originals that look shop-made), the late Reflexes extend Burn's critique of the artist's hand from spray-gunned anti-compositionality into the domain of 'delegated manufacture,' the production of pseudo-relics overseen by an artist-manager.

The argument that the artwork resides in the idea, not the object, was integral to Burn's minimalist and especially conceptual art. In 1966 he wrote of 'concentrating on the pure idea or concept to a point of denying any physical qualities whatsoever. The act of painting my pictures is so simple I could instruct someone else to paint one over the telephone.'⁴⁵ He put this thought into action two years later when he sent instructions from New York to Melbourne for the fabrication of his Mirror Pieces in The Field. A quarter century later he ordered the refabrication of his paintings at an auto spray shop somewhere in the vicinity of the inner western Sydney suburb of Rozelle, where he lived. 'Idea leading–object following,' Burn explained to curator Mary Eagle in 1992, as the pair negotiated the Canberra National Gallery's acquisition of several of his late '60s works, including a Blue Reflex and a new 'version' of Blue Premiss No. 2 (1966-67).⁴⁶

He wasn't alone in seeking to capitalise on changed ideas of originality and authenticity that arose from minimalist and conceptual art's historicisation, institutionalisation, and commercialisation in the 1980s. The decade witnessed a mass-refabrication of work by artists, dealers, museums, even collectors. This took various forms: the replacement of damaged works, the materialisation of unrealised plans, and the editioning of historical works, from artist-sanctioned remakes to collector Count Giuseppe Panza's creative fabrications of Judds and Flavins.⁴⁷ As Susan Hapgood observed in a prescient 1991 article, the recent 'controversy surrounding refabricated art of the Minimal and Conceptual periods is inextricably tied to the pioneering attitudes and practices of the time... if, as viewers of contemporary art, we are unwilling to relinquish the conception of the unique original art object, if we insist that all refabrications are fraudulent, then we misunderstand the nature of many of the key works of the '60s and '70s.'⁴⁸ Burn's reproductions at the end of that decade and start of next constitute an unwritten chapter in the afterlife of minimalism and conceptual art's critique of authenticity. Although pertaining primarily to the museumification of his art in Australian state museums, it's more than a provincial history.⁴⁹ The artist's gaming of art institutional systems in his capacity as art historian (sparking curatorial interest in his art then justifying its replication), finds no parallel in America or Europe outside the Oxfordshire activities of Baldwin, Ramsden, and Harrison. In the 1980s and '90s, A&L similarly implemented a rigorous program of auto-historicisation (via Harrison, a professional art historian), tightly controlled the curation of their work, and, as was typical of their milieu, reconstructed, replicated, and editioned their art as they saw fit.⁵⁰

While the mantra of reproducibility had its roots in minimalist and conceptual art of the 1960s, Burn's replicas resonated with distinctly '80s theories of mimesis (a paint-covered board resembles an original Blue Reflex, but this resemblance undermines the hegemony of the original) and simulation (there are no original Reflexes–they're all reproductions). To the extent that postmodernist critiques of originality and authenticity shaped the replicas, the artist's situatedness in '80s and '90s Sydney deserves attention. At the cutting-edge of postmodernism and the Anglophone reception of French theory, the city was home to young critics such as Meaghan Morris and Edward Colless, journals On the Beach and Frogger, and conferences such as 'Foreign Bodies' (1981) and 'Futur*Fall: Excursions into Post-Modernity' (1984), where Jean Baudrillard prophesied to a packed auditorium that history is a simulation. Other speakers at 'Futur*Fall' included Colless, with whom Burn shared an office in the art history department of Sydney University in 1979, and Burn's friend, collaborator, and ex-A&L member Terry Smith, who took the opportunity to analyse one of Baldwin and Ramsden's 'studio' paintings.

If Burn's age and union affiliation distanced him socially and politically from academic postmodernism, of which he was in any case sceptical, he still engaged with it. His 1981 letter to Paul Taylor, the editor of Melbourne art magazine Art & Text, disparaged semiotics as a 'pair of frilly French knickers'; nonetheless, Burn published 'The 1960s: Crisis and Aftermath' in its first issue (he subsequently aligned himself with the less cool Art Network). The literary remains of his final half-decade are marked by occasional references to Buchloh and Hal Foster of October journal. While Burn was sceptical of Buchloh and Foster's respective sidelining of cultural imperialism in 1960s art, their theorisations in 1986 and '87 of repetition in neo-avant-garde art, especially Foster's claim that the '60s had uncannily re-emerged in the'80s in the guise of critical postmodernism, piqued his curiosity as he resolved what to do with his Minimal-Conceptual Work. One wonders how closely he read October 37 (Summer 1986), the proceedings of a College Art Association symposium chaired by Rosalind Krauss on multiples and copies in modern art. Alongside Buchloh's critique of Peter Bürger through Yves Klein's blue monochromes 'The Primary Colours for the Second Time,' the issue contains Krauss' paper 'Originality as Repetition,' which lifts arguments from her book of the previous year, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Her deconstructionist account legitimated reproductions in and as art at precisely the moment that Australian appropriationists such as Imants Tillers, Janet Burchill, and Scott Redford were revivifying the linguistic forms of conceptual art.

The atmosphere of postmodernism lent the ploy of artwork reproduction aesthetic and theoretical currency. Why then did Burn, an artist extraordinarily willing to examine the intricacies of his own art, neglect to examine his own reproductions in published writings? Perhaps he thought that the matter required no special comment; though this is unlikely, given its mention in the plan for Minimal-Conceptual Work. A more likely explanation for Burn's silence is that sometime after pitching the show he was advised that flaunting the status of his replicas might not be good for business. Given that a painting's value is premised on authenticity, which is tied to provenance or traceability to a singular origin, it is not unreasonable to presume that news of the, say, 1991 reproduction of Blue Reflex would damage its value–even if the refabrication was overseen by the artist and aligned with his original intention. This is because even among the serial forms of minimalism and dematerialised relics of conceptual art, collectors prefer 'originals' and early versions. Norms of authenticity endure. Burn's new batch of '60s works risked rejection by collectors and museums; they might have been stripped of their artwork-status, an outcome ironically mirroring the relegation of Blue Reflex to a mere object in the auto shop, transferred to the legal-institutional frameworks of museum and market.

Authenticity is a bastion of capitalist bourgeois culture which Burn, an avowed Marxist, was pitted against–even as he happily took advantage of its monetary benefits. That, anyway, is one way to understand the remakes. The artist's anecdotal renaming of Blue Reflex not as a coloured mirror or wall ornament but 'display panel,' with its connotations of shop fitting or visual merchandise, shrewdly underlines its commodity status. Clearly, there was a financial incentive to fix-up old pieces and produce new 'versions' of Blue Reflex, Blue Premiss, Mirror Piece, Looking at a Piece of Glass, the Xerox Books and Systematically Altered Photographs. To understand the situation, it's helpful to put it in context of this ex-conceptual artist's life-world. Unlike many of his peers in art and academia, Burn's trek from art into academia and then trade unions hadn't reaped great monetary reward. Union Media Services, where he had worked full-time since 1981, was beset by financial problems, and he was repaying a mortgage while supporting a wife and two children. For Burn, increasing the stock of his art was a wise commercial decision, at a time when museums were finally expressing interest in his work.

To deny the financial incentive and claim that Burn was 'above' the commerce of art would be absurd; yet boiling down the replicas to economic self-interest is too simple. What makes them interesting is their laying bare the institutionalisation and marketisation of minimalist and conceptual art. They point as well to the late career reversal of Burn's phase of militant anti-capitalist posturing. Ironically he had stopped making objects in 1970, right when the market became interested in his work. Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects spurred a five-year flurry of exhibitions at American and European galleries and museums, but his supply of autonomous objects didn't expand during that period–everything carried the dates 1965-70. As the artist acknowledged in a 1971 letter to his mother, while boasting of a sizeable sale to Swiss collector Bischofberger: 'there isn't much work that was made during that time, so the well will more or less run dry sooner or later. And there is no possible way that we [he and Ramsden] can or will make more work which is saleable in those terms.'⁵¹

Burn's forecast was accurate: he wouldn't produce new objects for almost two decades, only occasional editions of conceptual classics like Mirror Piece. Questions of the timing, numbering, production, and location of such editions invite further inquiry; clearly, they prefigure the replication of Blue Premiss, Blue Reflex, and other works around the time of Minimal-Conceptual Work. By then, Burn's former hostility to the market (and museum) had softened; with the help of Peter Bellas, he'd succeeded in whetting the appetite of Australians museums for his avant-garde relics. In a 1992 meeting between the artist and National Gallery curator Eagle, the A.G.W.A. catalogue was repurposed as a sales manual in which the curator copied down prices next to artwork illustrations–of Blue Reflex, she noted, there were '12 available of differing sizes' valued between five and thirty-thousand dollars.⁵² The wide price range, it can be inferred, reflected not only differences in size but also condition and, perhaps, origin. 'It's curious (or maybe not),' Burn wrote to Ramsden a few months later, 'but most places here want one of the Blue Reflexes.'⁵³ Earlier, replication was justified as a matter of conservation, accessibility, or aesthetics–had the commodity status of the replicas become a primary factor in the replicative operation? Were the Reflexes an unlimited edition?⁵⁴

Burn's death preempted further discussion on his part of editioning, restorations, repairing, refabricating, replicating, or reconstructing. If these matters now appear clandestine, it's due more to their avoidance in the literature, CW included, and museum registries than any concerted effort by the artist. One can speculate about why his replicas have been omitted from the art historical narrative propagated by friends of the estate, such as Stephen.⁵⁵ Possibly it is feared that knowledge of Burn's replicas might affect the perceived authenticity of parts of the estate (that was Ramsden's worry about the Reflexes).⁵⁶ Whatever the reason for their non-existence in the secondary literature, the replicas have become the missing piece of Burn's late career. Their interpretative repercussions go beyond minimalist and conceptual art; for example, they illuminate his resumption of art making in the late 1980s. The argument that Burn's habitual collecting of amateur landscape paintings from charity shops 'returned him to making art'⁵⁷ always seemed to me slightly thin. After fifteen years away from the art world and twenty-five from gallery object production, he commenced handling, inspecting, stretching, cleaning, repairing, and remaking his Minimal-Conceptual Work out of practical necessity–tasks that gradually lured him back to art practice proper. This would be the Proustian version of Burn's return: his preparation of works for the retrospective awoke involuntary memories of producing those works in the late 1960s; the adaptation of relearned processes in turn culminated in a vertiginous renewal of his past practice.⁵⁸

To reiterate: it is mysterious that the replicas haven't been mentioned, let alone analysed, in the literature. The predicament owes much to the inaccessibility of Burn's archive–still, more than three decades after the artist's death.⁵⁹ There are 'human reasons' for its inaccessibility, such as the widow's attachment to her late husband's belongings and her reluctant communication with the art world; in recent years, illness has hindered her ability to supervise the upstairs-sited room. Nevertheless it is unfortunate, to say the least, that greater efforts haven't been made in the Burn camp to make publicly available in a timelier fashion 'the most important conceptual art archive in the southern hemisphere.'⁶⁰ Its long-term confinement seems not in keeping with the intersubjectivity of Burn's oeuvre. Of the handful or so of researchers who have accessed the archive since the artist's death, none other than Stephen have enjoyed ongoing, unconditional access. This arrangement has benefited her professionally, guaranteeing her a near-monopoly on Burn research but also earning her a reputation, perhaps unfair, as gatekeeper of the archive.⁶¹ As unrivalled expert she has authored articles, catalogues, and books–her editing of CW the latest–as well as exhibitions including the 2023 retrospective at Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Geneva. Overall, her projects have done much to promote Burn's art and writings and foster new generations of interest in his work, which is testament to Stephen's good research as much as the richness of Burn's work. CW is hers as much as his. With the addition of this important book to her already-substantial Burn corpus, her words have now been wrapped so thoroughly around his that it's hard to conceive of Burn without Stephen, or Stephen without Burn.

One consequence of Stephen's decades of premium archival access, however, is that beyond the formalities of the peer-review process and the odd review, her work has largely avoided scrutiny. Art historians simply must accept Stephen's 'version' of Burn, or turn away; there has been no way to challenge it empirically. This is hardly conducive to critique, that self-reflexive mode of thought and action prized by Burn and Stephen alike. Yet oddly Burn's archival inaccessibility sustains posthumously his occasional amusement in withholding information ('I never tell them...') in the form of literal, also epistemological, non-access. The dilemma it poses to the art historian is further Burnian because it demands interpretative risks be taken in absence of adequate data: speculation, as it were, on a condition of specularity. In a 2005 interview with a conservator, Avril Burn recalled that her late husband, a picture framer, 'was always fascinated by the backs of paintings and by the clues to be discovered behind old backing boards and mounts.'⁶² It's uncertain how many secrets will be found on the back of Burn's frames and boards, and in folders on the shelves of his study in the house where the elderly Avril still resides. Who knows–the prospect of future specialists microscopically scrutinising his artworks and fossicking through yellowing letters to verify conspiratorial theories, might have appealed to Burn. Alas for this new research to flourish the archive of Ian Burn must finally go public, unedited!

– David Homewood (2024-25)

davidrchomewood@gmail.com

^{1 John Stringer, 'Introduction,' Ian Burn: Minimal-Conceptual Work, 1965-1970 (Perth: Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1992), 5.↩
2 Below I take issue with these dates, but for clarity's sake here I adhere to the standard dates.↩
3 Ian Burn: Collected Writings 1966-1993, ed. Ann Stephen (Sydney: Power Publications; Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary Art; Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2024).↩
4 Ian Burn, Dialogue: Writings in Art History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991). This is not to forget Ian Burn, Art: Critical, Political (Sydney: University of Western Sydney, 1996), edited by Sandy Kirby. Although important, the book is not a general survey of Burn's writings.↩
5 Michael Auping, 'Interview with Ian Burn,' Art Contemporary, vol. 2, no. 1 (1976).↩
6 Ian Burn, 'Interview with Imants Tillers,' Art Monthly Australia, no. 159 (May 2003), 16-19.↩
7 Ian Burn to Charles Harrison, 9 September 1988. Archive of Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth.↩
8 Ian Burn, 'Notes for Ian Burn: Minimal-Conceptual Work, 1965-1970.' Archive of Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth.↩
9 Mel Ramsden and Michael Baldwin, 'Making Art from a Different Place,' Ian Burn: Minimal-Conceptual Work, 1965-1970 (Perth: Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1992), 7-16, 14. ↩
10 The exceptions in Australia are: Yellow Premiss (1965-66), shown 1966 at Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney (then afterwards in Jennifer Phipps' exhibition 'Minimal Art,' National Gallery of Victoria, 1976); two Mirror Pieces shown in The Field (1968); and the Xerox Books shown at Pinacotheca in August 1969. ↩
11 Ian Burn to Charles Harrison, 9 September 1988. Archive of Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth. ↩
12 That said, Blue Reflex appears on the cover of the short-lived 'interdisciplinary magazine' West vol. 3, no. 2 (1991), founded by photographer and academic Helen Grace and published by University of Western Sydney. There is some uncertainty as to how Grace or guest editor Rex Butler knew of Blue Reflex. Butler recalls that Grace organised the cover art, although she doesn't remember doing this; nonetheless, she claims she would have encountered Blue Reflex in trips to Burn's studio. Another possibility is that Butler learned of the painting when Burn delivered a paper at the Butler-curated 1991 exhibition 'Banal Art' ('Less is More, More or Less,' reproduced in CW). ↩
13 Two exceptions: in Stephen's biography, the work is dated '1967;' a '1966' Blue Reflex was acquired by Tate London and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2018. Robert Burn's recollection of Ian retrieving the letters from their mother's house suggests forgetfulness as a reason for his incorrect dates: 'Ian wanted those letters when we were cleaning up Mum's stuff, he really wanted those letters. He said that they were an invaluable record of the dates, the things that he couldn't recall.' Yet the fact that after accessing these letters, Burn retained his incorrect dates, suggests the deliberateness of his dates. Ann Stephen, 'Interview with Robert Burn,' December 1997. Paris Lettau Archive, Melbourne. ↩
14 The argument that Blue Reflex is part of a 'series' of paintings including Blue Predicate and Blue Premiss seems to mischaracterise their location in Burn's oeuvre. Whereas those other paintings feature 'blue,' they are hard-edge compositional compositions of acrylic paint on stretched canvas, entirely different to the industrial non-compositionality of the Reflexes. In response to my query about the date of Blue Reflex, Stephen responded: 'It is well known that the Blue Reflex paintings were the final works in a series of painted monochromes conceived in London in mid-1966. The series includes Blue Variable, Blue Predicate and Blue Premiss, all painted in various sizes, several accompanied by notes. Blue Premiss, No. 2 and Blue Reflex are dated 1966-67, to indicate the extended period over which the series evolved, coinciding with his arrival in NY in mid-1967. The date span indicates the period when the series was conceived, and this applies to all his works.' (Ann Stephen, 'Response to Homewood,' 11 August 2024). A couple of general points. (1) The idea that Blue Reflex, itself a series of paintings, is encompassed within a larger 'series,' seems confused and demands clarification. (2) I haven't seen any evidence of planning for Blue Reflex before 1968. (3) Stephen's last sentence above qualifies that all Burn's works are dated to their conception (not realisation). This has never been addressed in her expansive writing on the artist, and cannot be assumed. Stephen's writing about Burn's art, however, gives the impression that Burn's works were invariably produced in the years they are dated to. ↩
15 Ian Burn to Paul Partos, 20 November 1967. Estate of Paul Partos Archive, Melbourne. ↩
16 In a 17 March 1968 letter Burn informed his parents that the National Gallery of Victoria had 'asked for relevant biographical information and photographs or diagrams of recent work, which is pretty difficult to give them, since none of my recent work is possible to photograph. Ordinary diagrams of the actual works are not much better, so I am trying to work out a way I can diagram my methods or systems so that what I get is an algebraic projection or a verbal projection of the work in terms of an equation.' Paris Lettau Archive, Melbourne. ↩
17 Ian Burn to parents, 11 August 1968. Paris Lettau Archive, Melbourne. ↩
18 Ian Burn, 'Failed Blue Reflex,' undated. Ann Stephen Archive, Sydney. ↩
19 Benjamin Buchloh, 'Conceptual art 1962-1969: From The Aesthetic of Administration to Institutional Critique,' L'Art Conceptuel, Une Perspective (Paris: Musée d'Art Moderne, 1990), 41-53, 46. Charles Harrison discusses Kosuth's dates in 'Conceptual Art: Myths and Scandals', Artscribe, no. 80 (March-April 1990), 15-16, 16: 'The question of whether these works were 'done' when Kosuth says they were done (in 1965-66) must attend upon another: how is the doing to be defined? As Kosuth himself was at pains to point out–though he did not put it this way–he was not the only artist in the show retrospectively to have elevated art-school jeux d'espirit into canonical early works which happen merely to have remained unfabricated for some years.' A draft of the review is filed with correspondence between Burn and Harrison in the Archive of Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth. ↩
20 Ian Burn to Mel Ramsden, 8 February 1990. Estate of Mel Ramsden Archive, Oxfordshire. ↩
21 Joseph Kosuth (see next footnote), Terry Atkinson (see footnote 27), and Melbourne conceptual artist Dale Hickey (in conversation with the author) have questioned Burn's dates. In a mid-1971 letter to Melbourne gallerist Bruce Pollard, Hickey wrote that he was 'appalled' by Burn and Ramsden's 'consciousness of themselves in relation to art history,' and alleged that Ramsden had back-dated certain works. Dale Hickey to Bruce Pollard, mid-1971. Pinacotheca Archive, Melbourne. ↩
22 Burn's annotation in 'Conceptual Art: Then and Since; Terry Smith interviewed by Jelana Stojanovic,' Agenda, 26 & 27, November-December 1992, January-February 1993, 16 page supplement. Paris Lettau Archive, Melbourne. Terry Smith observes that in his 1970 essay 'Conceptual Art as Art,' Burn dates Kosuth's Protoinvestigations to their production not conception: the 'large photostats of dictionary definitions [were] made between 1967 and 1968.' (CW, 126-128) 'Kosuth's response was outrage at applying such anti-conceptual criteria to such work,' Smith reports in One and Three Ideas: Conceptualism Before, During, and After Conceptual Art, ed. Robert Bailey (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 120-21: 'he was an art student who had the ideas but not the resources to realise them; by the time he did have these resources a few years later, everyone (including Burn) was dating their work to the moment of conception–immediacy was the new currency.' Smith's account is based on a conversation with Kosuth, New York, March 27 2011. ↩
23 Ian Burn to Paul Partos 14 May 1968. Estate of Paul Partos Archive. ↩
24 See David Homewood and Paris Lettau, 'Hall of Mirrors,' The Field Revisited (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2018), 85-100. Terry Smith has no recollection of Burn's notes at the Sydney iteration of The Field. See his 'Nostalgia Redux: The Field Revisited,' Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 19, no. 1 (2019), 127-132, footnote 3. Among the pages sent to the National Gallery is a short document, 'Notes for Any Reflex and Surface' (1967-68), certifying that Burn's objects precede his diagrams: 'All diagrams are made after the work: they are literally invented, a fiction following a fact: an invention of a method-of-viewing for a work (and not conditions for viewing)... There is no limitation to the number of diagrams which might be invented at any time: there may be an endless series of diagrams based on and extending from one work.' (https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/the-field-revisited/) An edited version of the document, retitled 'Notes for Mirror Reflexes,' the date removed, is among the notes and diagrams for the classic version of Mirror Piece. ↩
25 The earliest photograph that I have seen of the now iconic version of the work in an exhibition context is Cologne, 1974. Surely there are earlier images, but I haven't had time to look into this further. ↩
26 The black and white image reproduced in CW looks the same as a colour-desaturated image of the third issue of VH magazine. Images from the same photoshoot have been miscaptioned by Stephen elsewhere, for example On Looking at Looking, 119, and Late Works, 72. ↩
27 Terry Atkinson to author, 16 January 2025. 'I remember on a trip to NY in [July] 1969, having a tussle with Ian and Mel over the revising of dates as they toiled to push back their dates towards Kosuth's '1965.' This was a quite widespread characteristic of Art & Language behaviour throughout, and remained so throughout the seventies and eighties. Kosuth's propensity to claim first base origin was... a motor for what developed into an A&L constituency habit.' ↩
28 Stephen On Looking at Looking, 133. ↩
29 Ian Burn, 'Interview with Hazel de Berg,' 30 April 1970, New York. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 4. ↩
30 Ian Burn, 'Interview with Joel Fisher,' The Situation Now: Object or Post-Object Art (Sydney: Contemporary Art Society, 1971). ↩
31 Both publications reproduce the 1-6 Glass/Mirror Piece version with two pages of notes, not the iconic version: one mirror with thirteen pages. ↩
32 I haven't yet ascertained which version of Mirror Piece was shown at Templon in 1971. Mirror Piece was subsequently shown at Paul Maenz, Cologne (1973), Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (1974) and John Weber, New York (1974). ↩
33 The painting and any paperwork were destroyed in a fire around 1975. Mel Ramsden to author, 1 December 2015. ↩
34 Mel Ramsden and Michael Baldwin, 'Making Art from a Different Place,' Ian Burn: Minimal-Conceptual Work, 1965-1970 (Perth: Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1992), 7-16, 13. ↩
35 Ian Burn to Michiel Dolk, April 1990. Cited in Dolk, 'It's Only Art Conceptually: A Consideration of the Work of Ian Burn 1965-1970,' Minimal-Conceptual Work, 17-24, 28. ↩
36 Ann Stephen, 'Ian Burn's Blue Reflex,' Less is More: Minimal + Post-Minimal Art in Australia ed. Sue Cramer (Bulleen: Heide Museum of Art, 2012), 87. Stephen quotes Donald Judd, 'John Chamberlain,' 7 Sculptors (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1966). ↩
37 Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 2003). ↩
38 Ian Burn to Seva Frangos, 24 July 1988. Archive of Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth. ↩
39 'Exhibition Outline' for Ian Burn: Minimal-Conceptual Work, 1965-1970. Mailed to Ghislain Mollet-Vieville 4 May 1989. ↩
40 My reduction of autographic to handmade simplifies the nuanced distinction between autographic and allographic developed in Goodman's Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, New York, Kansas City: The Bobbs-Merril Company, 1968). The bearing of these concepts on say Blue Reflex, an 'allographic painting,' is complex and requires elucidation. Goodman formulates the autographic-allographic distinction in the context of a general argument about authenticity in art, specifically whether the categories of original and forgery apply to a given work or medium–in an autographic work they apply ('the most exact duplication of it does not ... count as genuine') (p. 113); in allographic works they don't. The authenticity of an autographic work derives from the singular, unrepeatable gesture: 'physical identification of the product of the artist's hand, and consequently the conception of forgery of a particular work, assume a significance in painting that they do not have in literature.' (p. 116) Allographic arts such as literature or music, on the other hand, are 'systems of notation' or 'a definite notation, consisting of certain signs or characters that are to be combined by concatenation,' which 'provides the means for distinguishing the properties constitutive of the work from all contingent properties.' (ibid.) The musical composition or the novel, then, inheres in its notation, and for this reason if the work is copied correctly, the copy is not properly called a forgery but a new instance or edition of the work. Painting, on the other hand, has no 'alphabet of characters, none of the pictorial properties–none of the properties the picture has as such–is distinguished as constitutive; no such feature can be dismissed as contingent, and no deviation as insignificant.' (ibid.) A Blue Reflex complicates Goodman's classification of painting: the spray-gun cancels traditional signs of the artist's hand (Burn emphasised this through outsourcing its restoration). The appearance of a Reflex, moreover, is easily describable, as its method of production: the painting is, in Goodman's terms, a system of notation. Also see Goodman, 'A Note on Copies,' in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 44, no. 3 (Spring, 1986), 291-292, a riposte to W.E. Kennick's critique of his claim that painting is autographic. The discussion pivots on an art historical example not irrelevant to Blue Reflex: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's 'telephone paintings,' the legendary series of enamel paintings that the artist ordered from a factory, choosing the colours from a colour swatch. Kennick's point is that Moholy-Nagy's work is an allographic painting, and thus a problem for Goodman's classification of painting as autographic. Goodman responds: 'What constitutes the identity of a work derives from practice, and practice may change ... I doubt, though, that current practice accepts the objects dictated by Moholy-Nagy as "original paintings."' Goodman's observation about the malleability of artistic media is well-taken, but he is seemingly oblivious to the multitude of factory-made paintings at that time deemed authentic by critics, curators, dealers, collectors, and so forth. There isn't space to adequately expand on these issues here, but an important question raised by Goodman's arguments is to what extent a painting might escape its autographic identity. Blue Reflex to this end might be regarded as a test, or series of tests, of this identity. If the 1968 paintings complicate Goodman's notion of autographic painting, the outsourced replicas add to the complication (he was now ordering the painting, not painting it). A replica Reflex strains received notions of authenticity because it's a new version of a historical object (it seems significant not only that Burn himself sprayed the originals but that he sprayed them at a certain date). If a curator telephoned the same factory that made Burn's paintings and ordered more paintings, would these qualify as authentic? Probably not. But if the original paintings were irreparably damaged, and Burn himself ordered the fabrication of identical paintings to replace the damaged paintings, would the new paintings still be authentic? How would they be dated? Interestingly, Burn invoked the example of Moholy-Nagy in a May 1966 letter to parents: 'At present I'm concentrating on the pure idea, or concept, to a point of denying any physical qualities whatsoever. The actual act of painting my pictures is so simple at present that I could instruct someone else to paint one of my pictures over a telephone. But I like this way of working where the actual paint has no qualities of its own. There is an analogy of this in my liking and preferring typing letters to people instead of writing them in personal handwriting... Typing is a very abstract action. The actual typed script is so well-known that it no longer has any character or qualities, the script becomes very impersonal. So what you get is the pure ideas and a reflection of personality (this comes from the grammatical forms used, which is a personal choice; but there is no sense of any direct contact with personality, only a reflection of it.)' Paris Lettau Archive, Melbourne. ↩
41 I don't have incontrovertible proof that Burn replicated Blue Reflex, by which I mean produced (or ordered) new paintings around 1991 identical to those of 1968. My argument proceeds from this assumption, based on scant available evidence, as follows. The artist's intention to replicate conceptual works as well as proto-conceptual paintings Blue Reflex and Blue Premiss is well documented–his plan for Minimal-Conceptual Work was to produce travelling replicas of Blue Reflex and its sibling Grey Reflex (three Grey Reflexes exist, two in the estate including a prototype). The replication of Blue Reflex would explain the varied condition of extant works in the series. Some are pristine, their edges unmarked, the back of the boards and hanging frames neatly coated white and signed; others are worn, warped, with over-spray on the edges and verso–one work is signed twice. While I have not sighted any certification of a Blue Reflex replica, there are reproductions of other Minimal-Conceptual Works that aren't acknowledged as such. For example, a reconstructed version of Blue Premiss No. 2 was sold to the National Canberra, Canberra in 1992, but its reconstructed status wasn't recorded in the museum's file on the artwork, even though Burn was transparent about this. Such administrative omissions enhance the credibility of my view that Blue Reflex was replicated. On the balance of probabilities, it can be reasonably inferred that one or more Blue Reflexes were produced. In another sense, however, whether Burn produced new instances of the series in the late 1980s and early '90s is immaterial. Not only did he plan to replicate Blue Reflex, and did replicate Blue Premiss No. 2 and Mirror Piece–works historically before and after it; by his own admission in the 'Blue Reflex' lecture, he ordered the restoration of a Blue Reflex at an auto spray shop. This restoration was, effectively, a replication–because in recoating and polishing a Blue Reflex, its original paint surface is destroyed and replaced. ↩
42 Ian Burn, 'Conservation note for Blue Reflex,' 1990. Archive of Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. ↩
43 Dolk, 'It's only art conceptually: a consideration of the work of Ian Burn 1965-1970,' 27. ↩
44 Stephen, On Looking at Looking, 113. ↩
45 Ian Burn to parents, May 1966. Cited in Minimal-Conceptual Work, 59. ↩
46 Annotation next to Blue Reflex in Eagle's copy of Minimal-Conceptual Work, 70. The note was taken during a meeting with the artist in March or April 1992. Mary Eagle Archive, Canberra. ↩
47 For a generative study of authenticity and fabrication see Francesca Esmay, Ted Mann, Jeffrey Weiss (eds.), Object Lessons: Case Studies in Minimal Art - The Guggenheim Panza Collection Initiative (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2021). ↩
48 Susan Hapgood 'Remaking Art History,' Art in America (July 1990) 115, 122. ↩
49 One antecedent in said provincial history is Melbourne minimal painter Robert Hunter's replication of a 1970 minimalist painting in 1976, after the original fell out of a moving truck. Untitled (1970-76), an Agnes Martin-ish grid composition of hand-drawn lines and thread, is held in the National Gallery, Canberra. ↩
50 A&L's article 'To Say of a Painting That it is Fake' (1987) argues that the category of 'the fake' is chiefly of interest to historians seeking to 'justify interpretations' or create 'scandal,' and art market functionaries, because: 'the authenticated, genuine work of art is the fetish basis of a system of exchange. More particularly it is the fetish basis of a system of power, of a sense of stable cultural government.' The abstruse meditation leads to a consideration of fakes' evasion of interpretation because their 'fakeness' is decided by fact; but this false closure is precisely what makes them interesting, they argue in the following astonishing passage: 'Fakes are a displaced metonym for art–or for the possibility of its non-cognitive nature. The Fake (the capital 'F' signifies a fake that's been exposed) displaces the first-order murmur of aesthetic predication to make it either past ironical spectacle, or memory or just a faint possibility. The realisation of this faint possibility would require some aesthetification of the Fake which occurs rarely, but which is conceivable as a consequence of the aesthetification of the Fake genre as such. Another remote possibility would predicate aesthetification on the loss of the Fake's history as a Fake, as distinct from loss of aesthetification as a Fake.' The passage calls out for a conceptualisation of A&L's work of the 1980s through 'the fake' as well as Burn's reproductions–which have undergone a 'loss of... history as a Fake' since information of their provenance has disappeared from interpretative discourse around these works. Regarding Ramsden's approach to artwork replication and the matter of replication in general, ex-A&L member Michael Corris writes: 'I can tell you that Mel, to the best of my knowledge, would fabricate "early works" as necessary to get some cash. The practice is not as venal as it might seem, if you consider that the original concept for the work represents something like a "franchise" license for artists. They are, and should be, free to revisit earlier bodies of work. The problem is the dating of these subsequent versions.' Michael Corris to author, 8 January 2025. ↩
51 Ian Burn to parents, 11 November 1971. It continues: 'But it is a game that they insist on playing to their rules, and they do insist on it.' Paris Lettau Archive, Melbourne. ↩
52 Mary Eagle 1992 inscription in her copy of Minimal-Conceptual Work, 46. Mary Eagle Archive, Canberra. ↩
53 Ian Burn to Mel Ramsden, 8 July 1992. Estate of Mel Ramsden Archive, Oxfordshire. ↩
54 This last scenario sounds facetious, but it chimes with the first page of Mirror Piece: 'I certify that I consider this work is in no way unique and might be reproduced at any time or place by myself or any other person.' Contradicting the work's certification of its own reproducibility, however, is its status as an edition of 35. In this case, the real effect of the certificate is shown as just that–an effect–that is undermined by the legal status of Mirror Piece as a limited edition. ↩
55 The estate of Ian Burn is managed by Milani (formerly Bellas) Gallery, Brisbane. I am not implying malpractice on the part of the Milani or Bellas (or for that matter Stephen or Burn). Josh Milani has in various ways aided my research. ↩
56 Mel Ramsden to author, 26 October 2014. ↩
57 Stephen, On Looking at Looking, 205. ↩
58 As seen in the reinscription of conceptual works such as Looking Through a Piece of Glass (1968) in the 'Value Added' Landscapes (1992-93). Burn's re-appropriation of his conceptual work illustrates his 1989 claim, antithetical to his amateurish late 1960s historicism, that 'artists have never subscribed to the idea of a sequential logic and have flattened time according to the needs of their practice.' (Collected Works, p. 546) ↩
59 The letters, a fraction of the Estate of Ian Burn Archive, were donated to the National Art Archive at A.G.N.S.W. five or so years ago. Stephen's 'Acknowledgements' mention that the rest of Burn's archive will follow. ↩
60 Milani conversation with author, 31 July 2024. ↩
61 In his introductory remarks to the 2016 symposium 'Turning on Burn: a Reflective Conversation' at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Paris Lettau characterised Stephen as the 'guardian of Burn's legacy.' ↩
62 Anne Carter, 'A Reordering of Ian Burn's Re-ordered Painting, 1965,' Melbourne Journal of Technical Studies in Art, vol. 2 (2005). 'As a framer, too, Burn was always fascinated by the backs of paintings and by the clues to be discovered behind old backing boards and mounts ... Avril Burn has noted that he himself was very interested in documenting the development of his paintings, and that he kept a book containing notes and photographs of his works at different stages.' (p. 11) ↩}

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