Zoran Popović, “Struggle in New York,” translated from Serbian by Terence McEneny, originally published as “Borba u New Yorku,” in Umetnost 52–53 (1977): 73–75

Zoran Popovic is a Serbian Conceptual artist, sympathetic to the Art & Language group and The Fox magazine. He offers a reading of late Conceptualism, discussing the struggle between different left-orientated, post-Conceptual groups in the mid-1970s, and the fragmentation of New York Art & Language after 1975. Tautology, as the underlying principle of Conceptual art and a well-known principle of Western society, is no longer a secure refuge. Tautology as a trope is not unheard of among the reserved Anglo-Saxons, much like the robust tradition of empirical criticism and logical positivism, but now more than ever it is the hallmark of Conceptual art. SoHo has been home to so-called Conceptual art as the prototype of today’s avant-garde. Varied media and materials, such as photographs, film, slides, texts, and videos, have become an everyday occurrence in studios, galleries, and museums in SoHo and other places that actively follow the currents of international modern art.