These actions were documented in photographs and short descriptive texts, among other forms; this translation into factographic elements forms another level of the work, the only one directly accessible to any audience other than those present during the initial realization.
That same year, Collective Actions realized a performanceβagain in a winter landscape outside Moscowβentitled Deutsche Romantiker German Romantics , which amongst other elements involved period portraits of famous Romantics such as Adelbert von Chamisso, Bettina von Arnim, and Novalis affixed to trees.
The main objective is rather to move away from the visual and the phenomenological or the retinal, as Duchamp famously put it toward the indexical, toward pointing to things in an idea-driven way which does not preclude the use of images as long as they are in the service of this objective.
Secondly, conceptual art usually adheres to a fairly strict, reductivist ethos of economy of means in this alone, it does not fundamentally differ from the trajectory that leads from Malevich to Minimal art.
In other words, the idea is that for indexicalization to be most effective, it needs to be realized with as many elements as are necessary but as few as possible. A good example of the former strategy is Joseph Kosuth; a good example of the latter is Lawrence Weiner; Sol LeWitt sits somewhere in between. A relationship between things in the world is stated without necessitating a physical realization of that relationship to constitute the artwork.
