CONCEPTUAL ART

“Conceptual art is art for which the idea (or concept) behind the work is more important than the finished art object. It emerged as an art movement in the 1960s and the term usually refers to art made from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.” (From the Tate)

Some works are reflections on language and semiotics:

Artworks that ask us to think again about what we are really looking at, to be aware of form, signification, illusion, and ideas…

Which one is the chair? Are any of them chairs? What else in the museum is what it appears to be?

“A chair sits alongside a photograph of a chair and a dictionary definition of the word chair. Perhaps all three are chairs, or codes for one: a visual code, a verbal code, and a code in the language of objects, that is, a chair of wood. But isn’t this last chair simply . . . a chair? Or, as Marcel Duchamp asked in his Bicycle Wheel of 1913, does the inclusion of an object in an artwork somehow change it? If both photograph and words describe a chair, how is their functioning different from that of the real chair, and what is Kosuth’s artwork doing by adding these functions together? Prodded to ask such questions, the viewer embarks on the basic processes demanded by Conceptual art.

“The art I call conceptual is such because it is based on an inquiry into the nature of art,” Kosuth has written. “Thus, it is . . . a working out, a thinking out, of all the implications of all aspects of the concept ‘art,’ . . . Fundamental to this idea of art is the understanding of the linguistic nature of all art propositions, be they past or present, and regardless of the elements used in their construction.” Chasing a chair through three different registers, Kosuth asks us to try to decipher the subliminal sentences in which we phrase our experience of art.
“The art I call conceptual is such because it is based on an inquiry into the nature of art,” Kosuth has written. “Thus, it is . . . a working out, a thinking out, of all the implications of all aspects of the concept ‘art,’ ” From MOMA

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Some works use text as an image, and to convey ideas in interchangeable forms:

As a gesture of peace activism during the Vietnam war, Yoko Ono and John Lennon created this graphic image/declaration – blaring like a headline – to provoke thought. It has been re-made in various forms, in different locations, including non-gallery locations. Text is both an image, and an idea. And the artists explored the effects of bringing artwork outside of galleries, and made it circulate in the mainstream as billboards, newspapers, cheap, accessible posters/buttons etc.

Is there an original artwork here? What is the most important aspect of the work? Who is the work for? What does it mean if it’s copied and multiplied?

Jenny Holzer: A contemporary artist who uses text in public that circulates in different media/locations

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Some works are produced with a system, or even a set of instructions – and the final realization of the work is less important than the idea:

For Sol Lewitt, the IDEA is “the machine that makes the art”

“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. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman.” SL from Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.

“Incomplete Open Cubes demonstrates an artistic technique integral to the art of the 1960s: seriality. Generally speaking, serial art is generated through the application of premeditated rules or plans. In this case, LeWitt systematically explored the 122 ways of “not making a cube, all the ways of the cube not being complete,” per the artist. LeWitt might have taken all the necessary steps to realize each of the 122 solutions to his query, as seen here, but the work can hardly be understood as finished in the conventional sense. It would be more precise to say, according to LeWitt, that  Incomplete Open Cubes “[runs] its course,” ending abruptly. Moreover, to the extent that the cubes frame and, by extension, incorporate elements from the surrounding space, they muddy the boundary between art and world.” From the Met Museum

Erwin Wurm: A contemporary artist who uses instructions for an audience/performers to interpret

Erwin Wurm – see: Public Delivery article

What kinds of everday materials does Wurm use? Do you normally associate these objects/environments with the museum?

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Art that is made with a system

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO49s8WlUis

I will not make any more boring art – John Baldessari

Micah Lexier

39 Wood Balls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0YslbcvdXo

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What is the formula, task or recipe that these works begin with? Does it matter if they are impossible to realize perfectly? How might you compare this way of working to scientific methods?

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Institutional Critique, and art that is self-aware, self-reflexive

The Baldessari print is based on an installation created at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, but not by John Baldessari’s hand. “As there wasn’t enough money for me to travel to Nova Scotia, I proposed that the students voluntarily write ‘I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art’ on the walls of the gallery, like punishment. To my surprise they covered the walls.” Those same students made this print, but Baldessari wasn’t at the workshop when the print was made. In both cases, Baldessari gave scant instructions to the students from thousands of miles away, and he was not present to supervise, raising questions of authorship and the role of the artist.

Baldessari points out that language has made-up rules that we all agree to follow. Conventional notions of art may be as ingrained, passed down, and unquestioned as rules of language, but artists like Baldessari aimed to show that they are equally arbitrary, and open to interpretation. Baldesssari described his conceptual works as “what I thought art should be, not what somebody else would think art would be. You know, received wisdom, what you would get in school. And so a lot of my work was about questioning this received wisdom.” (From MOMA)

Piero Manzoni may not have lived to be 30, but he produced one of art history’s funniest gestures: Merda d’artista (Artist’s Shit), a 1961 project for which the Italian artist supposedly canned his own excrement. Reports from more recent years claim that some of the cans may have been filled with plaster, not poop, but Manzoni’s anti-art moves extended beyond that one conceit to others including abstract paintings made without paint. (From Art News)

From the article: https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/checklist/maurizio-cattelans-golden-toilet-in-the-time-of-trump

Enter Cattelan’s “America” (2016), the 18-karat gold, fully functioning toilet that was installed at the Guggenheim for nearly a year in a long-term, sculptural performance of interactive art. Like all of Cattelan’s most complex works, this sculpture is laden with possible meanings. There is the art-historical trajectory, from Duchamp and Manzoni to more contemporary artists like John Miller and Wim Delvoye, that traffics in scatological iconography. The equation between excrement and art has long been mined by neo-Marxist thinkers who question the relationship between labor and value. Expanding upon this economic perspective, there is also the ever-increasing divide in our country between the wealthy and the poor that threatens the very stability of our culture. Cattelan explicitly comments on this fact by creating what he called “one-percent art for the ninety-nine percent.” The gold toilet—a cipher for the excesses of affluence—was available for all to use in the privacy of one of the Guggenheim’s single-stall, gender-neutral bathrooms. More than one hundred thousand people waited patiently in line for the opportunity to commune with art and with nature.

Yet it was the Trump reference that resonated so loudly during the sculpture’s time at the Guggenheim. When the artist proposed the sculpture in mid-2015, Donald Trump had just announced his bid for the presidency. It was inconceivable at the time that this business mogul, he of the eponymous gilded tower, could actually win the White House. When the sculpture came off view on September 15, Trump had been in office for 238 days, a term marked by scandal and defined by the deliberate rollback of countless civil liberties, in addition to climate-change denial that puts our planet in peril.

That Trump is synonymous with golden toilets was proven not at the Guggenheim but in a recent satirical pop-up “exhibition” in midtown Manhattan staged by Trevor Noah of the Daily Show that he called the “Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library.” In addition to framed tweet storms, visitors were treated to a “tour” of the Oval Office, where they could don a Trump wig and pose with an, albeit fake, golden toilet.

Cattelan’s “America,” like all his greatest work, is at once humorous and searing in its critique of our current realities. Though crafted from millions of dollars’ worth of gold, the sculpture is actually a great leveler. As Cattelan has said, “Whatever you eat, a two-hundred-dollar lunch or a two-dollar hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise.” Art-wise, the work reached a certain pinnacle of acceptability—or notoriety—when it was featured on the cover of the New York Post (September 15, 2016) with the headline, “We’re #1 (and #2!),” and an article titled, “The Guggenheim Wants You to Crap All Over ‘America.’ ” However, Cattelan’s anticipation of Trump’s America will, perhaps, be the lasting imprint of the sculpture’s time at the Guggenheim. (from The Guggenheim Foundation)

Maurizio Cattelan – and the controversies of the art fair banana: