CONCEPTUAL ART
Synopsis
Conceptual art is a movement that prizes ideas over the formal or visual components of art
works. An amalgam of various tendencies rather than a tightly cohesive movement, Conceptualism
took myriad forms, such as performances, happenings, and ephemera. From the mid-1960s through
the mid-1970s Conceptual artists produced works and writings that completely rejected standard
ideas of art. Their chief claim - that the articulation of an artistic idea suffices as a work of art implied that concerns such as aesthetics, expression, skill and marketability were all irrelevant
standards by which art was usually judged. So drastically simplified, it might seem to many people
that what passes for Conceptual art is not in fact "art" at all, much as Jackson Pollock's "drip"
paintings, or Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes (1964), seemed to contradict what previously had passed for
art. But it is important to understand Conceptual art in a succession of avant-garde movements
(Cubism, Dada, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, etc.) that succeeded in self-consciously expanding the
boundaries of art. Conceptualists put themselves at the extreme end of this avant-garde tradition. In
truth, it is irrelevant whether this extremely intellectual kind of art matches one's personal views of
what art should be, because the fact remains that Conceptual artists successfully redefine the concept
of a work of art to the extent that their efforts are widely accepted as art by collectors, gallerists, and
museum curators.
CONCEPTUAL ART KEY IDEAS
Conceptual artists link their work to a tradition of Marcel Duchamp, whose Readymades had
rattled the very definition of the work of art. Like Duchamp before them, they abandoned beauty,
rarity, and skill as measures of art.
Conceptual artists recognize that all art is essentially conceptual. In order to emphasize this,
many Conceptual artists reduced the material presence of the work to an absolute minimum - a
tendency that some have referred to as the "dematerialization" of art.
Conceptual artists were influenced by the brut simplicity of Minimalism, but they rejected
Minimalism's embrace of the conventions of sculpture and painting as mainstays of artistic
production. For Conceptual artists, art need not look like a traditional work of art, or even take any
physical form at all.
The analysis of art that was pursued by many Conceptual artists encouraged them to believe
that if the artist began the artwork, the museum or gallery and the audience in some way completed it.
This category of Conceptual art is known as 'institutional critique,' which can be understood as part of
an even greater shift away from emphasizing the object-based work of art to pointedly expressing
cultural values of society at large.
Much Conceptual art is self-conscious or self-referential. Like Duchamp and other modernists,
they created art that is about art, and pushed its limits by using minimal materials and even text.
Beginnings
One of the most important precedents for Conceptual art was the work of Dada artist Marcel
Duchamp, who in the early twentieth century established the idea of the "Readymade" - the found
object that is simply nominated or chosen by the artist to be a work of art, without adaptations to the
object beyond a signature. The first and most famous true Readymade was Fountain (1917), which
was nothing more than a porcelain urinal, reoriented ninety degrees, placed on a stand and signed and
dated under the alias "R. Mutt." Duchamp described his Readymades as "anti-retinal," and dismissed
the popular conception that works of art need demonstrate artistic skill. In the 1950s, long after
several of his original Readymades had been lost, Duchamp re-issued Fountain and other
Readymades for the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. These acts sparked a resurgence of interest in
his work, which not only brought the emergence of Neo-Dada led by John Cage, Robert
Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns, but also rekindled a widespread interest in idea-based art throughout
the contemporary art world.
Fluxus and Minimalism to Conceptualism
While the late 1950s witnessed modern art's progressive shift from Abstract Expressionism to
Neo-Dada and Pop, the late 1960s witnessed a similar shift, only this time from Fluxus and
Minimalism to Conceptualism. Fluxus began in the early sixties, and has many affinities with Dada.
Embracing "flux", or change, as an essential element of life, Fluxus artists aimed to integrate art and
life, using any found objects and sounds, simple activities and situations as stimuli. George Maciunas,
Allan Kaprow, and composer John Cage are important Fluxus figures who impacted Conceptual art.
Adding to Conceptual art's diverse genealogy, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Robert Morris and other
Minimalist artists who emerged in the mid-1960s extended modernist abstraction by embracing
repetition, formal simplification, and industrial fabrication of their artworks. Judd and others rejected
much that was traditional in creating works that occupied space differently, often on a scale too large
for a pedestal or home, and usually made of nontraditional artistic materials like bricks or sheets of
steel, the production of which was outsourced. A number of burgeoning artists during this time paid
close attention to the paradigm shifts inherent in Fluxus and Minimalism, seeing that a so-called work
of art was not dependent upon the object/work itself, and that it could therefore exist chiefly as an
idea. Most saw their works in direct defiance of the art market, with its promotion of artistic
personalities and rare and original "masterpieces."
LeWitt's "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art"
In 1967, Sol LeWitt published "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" (considered by many to be the
movement's manifesto), in which he wrote: "What the work of art looks like isn't too important. It has
to look like something if it has physical form. No matter what form it may finally have it must begin
with an idea. It is the process of conception and realization with which the artist is concerned." The
notion of placing concept before object, and the value of realization over any aesthetic concerns
importantly contradicted the theories and writings of formalist art critics like Clement Greenberg and
Michael Fried, whose work focused chiefly on the examination of objects, materials, colors and forms
- had helped to define the aesthetic criteria of the preceding generation of artists.
Wiener's "Declaration of Intent"
Conceptual art was taken to the extremes of art as idea by Lawrence Weiner in his 1968
"Declaration of Intent," which declared he would cease the practice of creating physical art, citing no
need to build something when the idea behind any work of art should suffice, since the artist's intent
remains the same (or should, ideally), regardless of whether the work is in physical form or merely
conceptual.
The Formation of the Movement
While conceptualist artists forever remained a disparate, international group harboring a great
many ideas about contemporary art, by the late 1960s it was somewhat evident that a loose movement
was coalescing. In 1968 a series of Conceptual art exhibitions vigorously promoted the movement in
New York, put together by the dealer and curator Seth Siegelaub. In 1969, New York's Museum of
Modern Art gathered a number of artists from the movement for an exhibition titled "Information."
This event was not to be taken without a grain of salt, since Conceptualism was largely critical of the
institutional museum system and its market-driven interests, the system within which they exhibited.
Artist Collectives Emerge
In 1967, a collective of British artists formed the group Art & Language while teaching art in
Coventry, England. Through a series of published journals the group showed an outspoken distaste
for entanglement of modern art and the marketplace. Over the next several yearsmany would join the
group, whose rotating membership would reach approximately 50 artists before its dwindling in the
late 1970s.
Other artist collectives were similarly political in their focus. The Canadian group General Idea
had a small membership of three artists, Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal, and AA Bronson, who embraced
ephemeral works and installations. Active from 1967 to 1994, in the 1980s their works addressed the
pharmaceutical industry and the AIDS crisis. In South America, artists found Conceptualism an
effective pathway to creativity and political opposition. Conceptualism was particularly appealing
there as it was not an imported style per se, but rather a means of expression with no single frame of
reference, whether cultural, aesthetic, or ideological. Artist collectives provided anonymity, and thus
protection from prosecution by oppressive authorities, and the opportunity to make strong social
statements. The Chilean group CADA (Art Action Collective) and the Peruvian group Parenthesis
exemplified this trend.
Concepts and Styles
Conceptual art was conceived as a movement that extended traditional boundaries, and hence it
can be difficult to distinguish self-conscious Conceptualism from the various other developments in
art of the 1960s. Conceptualism could take the form of tendencies such as happenings, performance
art, installation, body art, and earth art. The principle that united these developments was the rejection
of traditional ways of judging works of art, the opposition to art being a commodity, and the belief in
the essentially conceptual nature of all works of art. Because it circumvented aesthetics, it is difficult
to define conceptual art on stylistic grounds other than a delivery that seems objective and
unemotional. While a conceptual work may possess no particular style, one could say that this
everyday appearance and this diversity of expression are characteristics of the movement.
Art as Idea
Among the first to pursue the notion of idea-based art to its logical conclusion was Joseph
Kosuth, who evolved a highly analytical model premised on the notion that art must continually
question its own purpose. Advocating his ideas most famously in a three-part essay entitled "Art after
Philosophy" (1969), Kosuth argued that it was necessary to abandon traditional media in order to
pursue this self-criticism. He questioned the notion that art necessarily needed to be manifested in a
visual form - indeed, whether it needed to be manifested in any physical form at all. Many, like
Lawrence Weiner, similarly stated the need to relinquish the practice of creating physical works of
art. By striving to minimize the materiality of art, artists strove to remove aesthetic criteria and the
commodity status out of the artistic equation. The "dematerialization of art object," as the art critic
Lucy Lippard described the tendency in the chronicle of Conceptualism (Six Years: the
Dematerialization of the Art Object), thus had a subtle political undercurrent. Conceptual art ideas
often evoked dispersal (instead of formation), and voiding (instead of creation), and many of the
Conceptual artistic ideas were open-ended propositions that lacked foregone conclusions. For
instance, Lawrence Weiner's "Statements" of 1968 include "A field created by structured
simultaneous TNT explosions" and "One standard dye marker thrown into the sea," and epitomize the
open-ended and hence anti-authoritarian stance of the movement. As Wiener explained in his
"Declaration of Intent" (1968-9), "Art that imposes conditions - human or otherwise - on the receiver
for its appreciation in my eyes constitutes aesthetic fascism."
Language as Art
Although the use of text in art was nothing new by the 1960s - text appears alongside other
visual elements in Cubist paintings, for example - artists such as Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth,
Ed Ruscha, and John Baldessari adopted text as the chief element of a visual work of art. Unlike their
predecessors, this generation had pursued college degrees, which in part accounts for their
intellectualism and the influence of recent studies in linguistics. The language used was meant to
signify itself and an artistic idea. Text-based art would often use abstract formulations, often in the
form of abrupt commands, ambiguous statements, or just a single word to create associations for the
viewer. While first-wave conceptualists like Weiner and Baldessari remain active today, they inspired
younger artists from Jenny Holzer to Tracey Emin to continue the practice of language-based art and
to push the boundaries of art and its definitions.
Anti-commodification and Institutional Critique
If Conceptual art had a central tenet that united all artists under one banner, it was surely their
shared discomfort with the institutionalized state of the art world, as arbiter of constituted "good" vs.
"bad" art. The artistic gatekeepers had been guided largely by market concerns since the mid-ninetieth
century, such that "good" art was marketable, and "bad" art was not. The beneficiaries of this system
were a small group of (mostly male and white) artists, and members of an elite social class who sold
and collected the work, or who participated in the administration of museums. In the 1960s, there was
the sense that if art catered to this world then it will surely not strive to challenge any status quo, or
be avant-garde. Conceptual artists and theorists looked closely at modern art practices and trends
during the 1960s and early 1970s, seeking forms of radical theory or aesthetics, but found largely a
continuation of abstract, post-abstract and minimalist motifs. "What can you expect to challenge in
the real world," wrote Burn in the pages of Artforum in 1975, "with 'colour', 'edge', 'process', systems,
modules, etc. as your arguments? Can you be any more than a manipulated puppet if these are your
'professional' arguments?"
The late 1960s witnessed the emergence of a form of Conceptualism that has come to be
known as institutional critique, practiced by artists such as Hans Haacke, Michael Asher, Daniel
Buren, and Marcel Broodthaers. Institutional critique continued the tradition of idea-based art, but
usually in the form of installations that implicitly questioned the assumed function of the museum-i.e. preservation and exhibition of masterpieces - by providing a view to its greater role within society
at large (eg. as arbiter of taste, as investor, as tax shelter, and gatekeeper to artistic success). The
museum is not a neutral hall for the exhibition of works and education of the public. Rather, it is
invested in promoting certain artists, in selecting "important" works of art, and in shaping the
economic reality that benefits its trustees and the established art world. The inherent complexity of
institutional critique is that it was often staged within the very institutions that artists were critiquing,
as with Hans Haacke's MoMA Poll (1970). At times, the success of a particular work relied on the
participation of viewers, thus demonstrating that the work, like the "art world" includes viewers as
well as artists and the institutions that host them. Thus it is important to note that rather than simply
negating or rejecting the institution, these artists often implicated themselves, and sought to bring
awareness to complex fabric of social and institutional relations.
Challenges to Authorship
When Marcel Duchamp nominated a urinal as a work of art and reissued later editions of his
Readymades, he delivered clear blows to the West's collective notion of artistic creativity. In keeping
with this model, Sol LeWitt's "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" advocated the idea that the work need
not necessarily be fully 'authored' by the artist. "When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means
that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.
The idea becomes a machine that makes the art." This idea of an automated or machine-like execution
of the art-idea is symptomatic of Conceptualism at large. For instance, in Vito Acconci's Following
Piece (1969), the artist subjected his vision to an outside force: the random movements of strangers
that he followed on the street until they disappeared into private space. The parameters of the work
(the goal, the documentation method) were decided in advance by Acconci, but the resulting path
traversed and subjects (the exact people, number of photographs, specific locations, etc.) occured
based on the decisions made by randomly selected individuals and were thus exempt from Acconci's
agency.
This denial of the artist as "master" and sole creator of the work also translates to many
posthumous works with which the artist's name is associated, but where he/she is not the fabricator.
LeWitt in particular, who passed away in 2007, was survived by a number of unrealized sketches for
sculptural and other works of art, which to this day are often created anew by teams of fabricators and
assistants, thus allowing brand new LeWitt works to be made even while the artist is dead. Such
fabrication in the name of the artist echoes prior modern art practices, particularly in sculpture (the
estate of Auguste Rodin is a well-known example of posthumous artistic production). While
authorship is, strictly speaking, a component of LeWitt's posthumously issued works, the practice
flies in the face of traditional notions of craft and mastery.
Photo-conceptualism
Photo-conceptualism is a persistent trend associated with Conceptualism. Conceptual artists
often relied on documentation of their ideas, and photography was a convenient means to this end.
Photography could be integrated into the concept or system that the artist devised, just as a diagram
or a text could illustrate it. In this sense, the documentation is the work of art, and vice versa, and
because of this the usual hierarchical distinction between "work" and "document" - where the former
is considered more important than the latter - is undone. In counter distinction to many
photographers, Conceptualists were not concerned with photographic quality, whether determined by
the print, composition, lighting, or editing. Furthermore, their dryly objective approach resulted in
photographs that prevent access to the artist's personality, and which prevent a strong emotional
response from the viewer. Edward Ruscha's matter-of-fact photographs of "Every Building on the
Sunset Strip," which he methodically produced with a camera strapped to his pickup truck exemplify
this artistically anti-expressive approach to creating photo-conceptual works.
Later Developments
Although the model of Conceptual art promoted by Joseph Kosuth and Art & Language might
be seen as the epitome of the movement - others explored avenues that were arguably as influential.
Conceptual art sidestepped conventions of craftsmanship and style to an extent that it could be said to
place renewed emphasis on content, which had been largely banished under critical emphasis on
form. Emergent during a period of major social upheaval, Conceptualism's central tenant - that the
idea is paramount - found broad application by artists wishing to emphasize diverse social issues. The
social issues addressed by international artists such as Hans Haacke, Martha Rosler, Jenny Holzer,
Luis Caminzer, Alfredo Jaar, and Ai Weiwei, include labor and gender relations, museum
stewardship, and poverty and censorship.
While the movement often emphasized the social construction of the work of art,
Conceptualism was not populist and had limited popularity outside of the art world due to its arcane
perception. Furthermore, fractures began to develop in the movement by the mid-1970s, leading to
the dissolution of the movement. Still, it eventually became inspiration to subsequent postConceptual artists, many of whom embraced the material basis of art and the langue of visual culture,
such as the so-called Pictures Generation led by Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince. Others
continued to sidestep traditional artistic production through Performance art or installations. Thus,
many of the concerns, and something of its austere style and tactics endure to this day in the works of
a wide variety of artists, including Andrea Fraser, Tino Seghal, Gabriel Orozco, Rirkrit Tiravanija,
Glen Ligon, and Damien Hirst.
Original content written by Justin Wolf
QUOTES
"People, buying my stuff, can take it wherever they go and can rebuild it if they choose. If they keep
it in their heads, that's fine too. They don't have to buy it to have it - they can just have it by knowing
it."
- Lawrence Weiner
"In order to gain some insight into the forces that elevate certain products to the level of 'works of art'
it is helpful - among other investigations - to look into the economic and political underpinnings of
the institutions, individuals and groups who share in the control of power."
- Hans Haacke
"When objects are presented within the context of art (and until recently objects always have been
used) they are as eligible for aesthetic consideration as are any objects in the world, and an aesthetic
consideration of an object existing in the realm of art means that the object's existence or functioning
in an art context is irrelevant to the aesthetic judgment."
- Joseph Kosuth