Conceptual art

• 1. Introduction

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  Conceptual art begins with a sentence, not a brushstroke. The American artist Sol LeWitt put it plainly. In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, all the planning and decisions are made beforehand, and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. That definition was one of the first to appear in print. It captured a strange possibility. Some works of conceptual art could be built by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions. Here the concept matters equally to or more than the usual aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. So what happens when an artist stops making objects and starts asking what art even is? Who first decided a urinal could belong in an exhibition? And why did a movement built on stripping art down to pure thought end up, decades later, meaning almost the opposite of what it set out to mean?

• 2. The Readymade Inheritance

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  Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal with the pseudonym R. Mutt and called it Fountain in 1917. He submitted the standard urinal-basin to the annual, un-juried exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. The exhibition rejected it. The artistic tradition would not see a commonplace object as art, because it was not made by an artist, not intended as art, and neither unique nor hand-crafted. Duchamp paved the way for the conceptualists with these readymades. His earliest gestures stretch back further. In 1913 he mounted a bicycle wheel by its fork on a painted wooden stool, later recognized as the first kinetic sculpture, though he did not have the idea for readymades until two years afterward. In 1915 he carefully painted a title onto a snow shovel, In Advance of the Broken Arm, the first piece he officially called a readymade. The full weight of Duchamp's example was acknowledged by Joseph Kosuth in his 1969 essay, Art after Philosophy. Kosuth wrote that all art after Duchamp is conceptual in nature, because art only exists conceptually.

• 3. Naming The Concept

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  Henry Flynt coined the term concept art in 1961, in an article of the same name in the proto-Fluxus publication An Anthology of Chance Operations. Flynt, a philosopher and artist, said his concept art devolved from his notion of cognitive nihilism, in which paradoxes in logic evacuate concepts of substance. Drawing on the syntax of logic and mathematics, it was meant to supersede both mathematics and the formalistic music then current in serious art music circles. To merit the label, Flynt maintained, a work had to be a critique of logic or mathematics in which a linguistic concept was the material, a quality absent from later conceptual art. The term took on a different meaning with Joseph Kosuth and the English Art and Language group. They discarded the conventional art object in favour of a documented critical inquiry into the artist's social, philosophical, and psychological status. That inquiry began in Art-Language: The Journal of Conceptual Art in 1969. By the mid-1970s they had produced publications, indices, performances, texts, and paintings. In 1970, Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects, the first dedicated conceptual-art exhibition, took place at the New York Cultural Center.

• 4. Against Greenberg's Formalism

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  Clement Greenberg argued that Modern art followed a process of progressive reduction toward the essential, formal nature of each medium. The influential New York critic held that elements running counter to a medium's nature should be removed. The task of painting was to define precisely what kind of object a painting truly is. Since paintings are flat objects with canvas surfaces onto which colored pigment is applied, figuration, three-dimensional perspective illusion, and references to external subject matter were all judged extraneous to painting's essence. Conceptual art emerged during the 1960s in part as a reaction against this formalism. Some have argued that conceptual art continued Greenberg's dematerialization by removing the need for objects altogether. Many of the artists themselves saw it instead as a radical break with his formalist Modernism. They kept a preference for art to be self-critical and a distaste for illusion. By the end of the 1960s, Greenberg's demand that art stay within the confines of each medium and exclude external subject matter no longer held traction.

• 5. Owning An Idea

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  Lawrence 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. That statement aimed at the commodification of art. Conceptual art attempted to subvert the gallery or museum as the determiner of art, and the art market as its owner and distributor. Much of this work can only be known through documentation: photographs, written texts, or displayed objects, which some argue are not in themselves the art. In the work of Robert Barry, Yoko Ono, and Weiner, art is sometimes reduced to a set of written instructions describing a work, but stopping short of actually making it. The idea matters more than the artifact. This methodology serves as the foundation for Protocolar Art, which explores the administrative and physical certification of the artistic act. Several artists pushed certification to extremes. Piero Manzoni exhibited tins purportedly containing his own feces in 1961, Artist's Shit, and put them on sale for their own weight in gold. He also sold his own breath enclosed in balloons as Bodies of Air, and signed people's bodies, declaring them living works of art. Marcel Broodthaers and Primo Levi were among the designated artworks.

• 6. Language As Material

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  Anne Rorimer writes of Lawrence Weiner that the thematic content of individual works derives solely from the import of the language employed, while presentational means and contextual placement play crucial yet separate roles. Language was a central concern for the first wave of conceptual artists of the 1960s and early 1970s. Using text in art was not new, but only in the 1960s did Weiner, Edward Ruscha, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Barry, and Art & Language begin to produce art by exclusively linguistic means. Where language had once been one visual element among others, subordinate to a composition such as Synthetic Cubism, these artists used language in place of brush and canvas and let it signify in its own right. Peter Osborne, the British philosopher and theorist of conceptual art, points to a turn toward linguistic theories of meaning in both Anglo-American analytic philosophy and Continental structuralist and post-structuralist thought during the middle of the twentieth century. This linguistic turn reinforced and legitimized the direction the conceptual artists took. Osborne notes the early conceptualists were the first generation of artists to complete degree-based university training in art. In a public lecture at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Villa Sucota in Como on the 9th of July 2010, he argued that contemporary art is post-conceptual.

• 7. From Instruction To Spectacle

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  John Cage's 4'33'' premiered on the 29th of August 1952, performed by pianist David Tudor in Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock, New York. The three-movement composition is commonly perceived as four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence. The decades after produced a run of works that turned instructions, erasure, and gesture into art. In 1953 Robert Rauschenberg made Erased De Kooning Drawing, a drawing by Willem de Kooning that Rauschenberg erased, raising the question of whether erasing another artist's work could be a creative act. Yoko Ono published Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings in 1964, a series of instructions for obtaining an aesthetic experience. Lawrence Weiner relinquished the physical making of his work in 1968 and wrote his Declaration of Intent. It reads that the artist may construct the piece, the piece may be fabricated, the piece need not be built, each being equal, with the decision resting with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership. The same impulse later turned theatrical and costly. Charles Saatchi funded Damien Hirst in 1991, and the next year his Saatchi Gallery exhibited The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine. Maurizio Cattelan sold two editions of Comedian, a banana duct taped to a wall, for US$120,000 each in 2019.

• 8. The Word's Second Life

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  Mel Bochner explained as early as 1970 why he disliked the epithet conceptual. It is not always clear what concept refers to, and it risks being confused with intention. That ambiguity helps explain how the term drifted from its origins. Through its association with the Young British Artists and the Turner Prize during the 1990s, conceptual art in popular British usage came to denote all contemporary art that does not practice the traditional skills of painting and sculpture. Neo-conceptual art describes practices from the 1980s and especially the 1990s that derive from the movement of the 1960s and 1970s. These later initiatives include the Moscow Conceptualists, United States neo-conceptualists such as Sherrie Levine, and the Young British Artists, notably Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. The Turner Prize kept rewarding the impulse. Martin Creed won it in 2001 for Work No. 227: The lights going on and off, an empty room in which the lights go on and off. The drift even reached fiction, where the movement is parodied in Jilly Cooper's 2002 novel Pandora. One thread from the first wave still runs forward: Olaf Nicolai's 2014 Memorial for the Victims of Nazi Military Justice on Vienna's Ballhausplatz carries a poem by Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay of just two words, all alone.