Conceptual art

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Conceptual art, sometimes called idea art, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved are considered the real substance of the art, in distinction to the traditional expectation of a made art object to be the criterion. Conceptual art may not even produce an art object, but rather a physical manifestation that is to be viewed as a document of the art.

The artist Sol LeWitt stated:

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. 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.

History

The work of the French artist Marcel Duchamp from the 1910s and 1920s paved the way for the conceptualists, providing them with examples of prototypically conceptual works (the readymades, for instance) that defied previous categorisations. The most famous example of a readymade is a standard urinal basin, which Duchamp signed "R.Mutt", titled Fountain and attempted to exhibit (it was rejected). In traditional terms this could not be said to be art because it was not made by an artist, it was not made with the intention of being art, and , being a commonplace object, it did not possess the expected visual properties of art.

Because Conceptual Art is so dependent upon the text (or discourse) surrounding it, it is strongly related to numerous other movements of the last century.

In part as a reaction against formalism as it was then articulated by the influential New York art critic Clement Greenberg, conceptual art emerged as a movement during 1960s. In 1961 the term "concept art" appeared in a Fluxus publication. However it assumed a different meaning when employed by US artist Joseph Kosuth and the English Art and Language group, who discarded the conventional art object in favour an documented critical inquiry into the artist's social, philosophical and psychological status. By the mid-1970s they had produced publications, indexes, performances, texts and paintings to this end. The key point was that the art object was not the goal nor an end in itself. In 1970 Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects, the first dedicated conceptual art exhibition, was mounted at the New York Cultural Center. [1]

Conceptual art also reacted against the commodification of art; it attempted a subversion of the gallery or museum as the location and determiner of art, and the art market as the owner and distributor of art. Laurence Weiner said : "Once you know about a work of mine you own it. There's no way I can climb inside somebody's head and remove it." Many conceptual artists' work can therefore only be known about through documentation which is manifested by it, e.g. photographs, written texts or displayed objects, which are not in themselves the art. It is sometimes (as in the work of Robert Barry, Yoko Ono, and Weiner) reduced to a set of written instructions describing a work, but stopping short of actually making it—emphasising that the idea is more important than the artifact.

The first wave of the "conceptual art" movement extended from approximately 1967 to 1978. Early "concept" artists like Henry Flynt, Robert Morris and Ray Johnson influenced the later, widely-accepted movement of conceptual artists like Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, and Douglas Huebler. Now these in turn have proven very influential on a following group of artists—sometimes labeled "second- or third-generation" conceptualists or "post-conceptual" artists—such as Mike Kelley, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. (However, it should be noted that Emin herself rejects conceptual art in favour of emotional expression.) Today artists like Adrian Piper, Jen Silver, damali ayo and Janine Antoni are a new wave of conceptual artists, addressing socio-cultural issues, such as stereotyping, race, gender and intimacy.

Examples of Conceptual Art

1953 : Robert Rauschenberg exhibits 'Erased De Kooning Drawing' which was exactly what it said. It raised the questions: is erasing something a creative act? Would an erased drawing by anyone be art or would it only be art if it was erased by a recognised artist like Rauschenberg? Rauschenberg also in 1953 sent a telegram to an art gallery which said: 'This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.'

1957: Yves Klein, 'Aerostatic Sculpture (Paris)'. This was composed of 1001 blue balloons released into the sky. Klein also exhibited 'One Minute Fire Painting' which was a blue panel into which 16 firecrackers were set. Later in 1957 Klein declared that his paintings were now invisible and to prove it he exhibited an empty room. This exhibition was called 'The Surfaces and Volumes of Invisible Pictorial Sensibility'.

1959: Piero Manzoni exhibited chrome cylinders of his own faeces. He puts the cylinders on sale for their own weight in gold. He also sells his own breath (enclosed in balloons) as 'Bodies of Air'.

1960: Yves Klein's action called 'A Leap Into The Void', in which he attempts to fly by leaping out of a window. He stated: 'The painter has only to create one masterpiece, himself, constantly.'

1960: The artist Stanley Brouwn declares that all the shoe shops in Amsterdam constitute an exhibition of his work. In Vancouver, Iain and Ingrid Baxter exhibited the contents of a four room apartment wrapped in plastic bags.

1961: Piero Manzoni signs people's bodies, thus declaring them to be living works of art either for all time or for specified periods of time (this depends on how much they are prepared to pay).

1962: Christo Javacheff's 'Iron Curtain' work. This consists of a barricade of oil barrels in a narrow Paris street which caused a large traffic jam. The artwork was not the barricade itself, of course, but the resulting traffic jam.

1962: Yves Klein presents 'Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity' in various ceremonies on the banks of the Seine. He offers to sell his own 'pictorial sensitivity' (whatever that was, he did not define it) in exchange for gold leaf. In these ceremonies the purchaser gave Klein the gold leaf in return for a certificate. Since Klein's sensitivity was immaterial, the purchaser was then required to burn the certificate whilst Klein threw the gold leaf into the Seine. (There were seven purchasers.)

1962: Piero Manzoni created 'The Base of the World', thereby exhibiting the entire planet as his artwork.

1965: A complex conceptual art piece by John Latham called 'Still and Chew'. He invites art students to protest against the values of Clement Greenberg's 'Art and Culture' (much praised and taught in in London's St. Martin's School of Art where Latham taught). Pages of Greenberg's book (borrowed from the college library) are chewed by the students, dissolved in acid and the resulting solution returned to the library bottled and labelled. Latham was then fired from his part-time position.

1969: Robert Barry's 'Telepathic Piece' of which he said 'During the exhibition I will try to communicate telepathically a work of art, the nature of which is a series of thoughts that are not applicable to language or image'.

1970: Painter John Baldessari exhibits a film in which he sets a series of erudite statements by Sol LeWitt on the subject of conceptual art to popular tunes like 'Camptown Races' and 'Some Enchanted Evening'.

1970: Douglas Huebler exhibits a series of photographs which were taken every two minutes whilst driving along a road for 24 minutes.

1970: Douglas Huebler asks museum visitors to write down 'one authentic secret'. The resulting 1800 documents are compiled into a book which, by some accounts, makes for very repetitive reading as most secrets are similar.

1971: Hans Haake's 'Real Time Social System'. This piece shows photographs of large New York slum buildings all of which were owned by one firm. The captions gave various financial details about the landlords. The Guggenheim museum trustees were offended by this and cancelled the exhibition, so Haake made another piece detailing the Guggenheim family's business interests.

1972: Fred Forrest buys an area of blank space in the newspaper Le Monde and invites readers to fill it with their own works of art.

1977: Walter de Maria's 'Vertical Earth Kilometer' in Kassel, Germany. This was a one kilometer brass rod which was sunk into the earth so that nothing remained visible except a few centimeters. Despite its size, therefore, this work exists mostly in the viewer's mind.

1991: Charles Saatchi funds Damien Hirst and the next year in the Saatchi Gallery exhibits his The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine.

1993: Vanessa Beecroft holds her first performance in Milan, Italy, using models to act as a second audience to the display of her diary of food.

1999: Tracey Emin is nominated for the Turner Prize. Part of her exhibit is her dishevelled bed, surrounded by detritus such as condoms, blood-stained knickers, bottles and her bedroom slippers.

2005: David A. Scott opens the Cincinnati Gallery of Conceptual Art, an online showcase for conceptual artists from around the world. The site is also a springboard for ideas expressed through articles written by the artists.

Anti conceptual art

In Britain the prominent rise of the Young British Artists (YBAs) led by Damien Hirst during the 1990s initiated a backlash against conceptual art. The Stuckist group of artists, founded in 1999, proclaimed themselves "pro-contemporary figurative painting with ideas and anti-conceptual art, mainly because of its lack of concepts." They also called it pretentious, "unremarkable and boring" and on July 25, 2002 deposited a coffin outside the White Cube gallery, marked "The Death of Conceptual Art". [2]

In 2002, Ivan Massow, the Chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts branded conceptual art "pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat" and in "danger of disappearing up its own arse ... led by cultural tsars such as the Tate's Sir Nicholas Serota. [3] Massow was consequently forced to resign. At the end of the year, the Culture Minister, Kim Howells (an art school graduate) denounced the Turner Prize as "cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit". [4]

In October 2004 the Saatchi Gallery told the media that "painting continues to be the most relevant and vital way that artists choose to communicate." [5] Following this Charles Saatchi began to sell prominent works from his YBA collection.

Notable Conceptual Artists

See also

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