Conceptual art

Conceptual art. A type of art in which the idea or ideas that a work represents are considered its essential component and the finished ‘product', if it exists at all, is regarded primarily as a form of documentation rather than as an artefact. Conceptual art emerged as a genre in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but its origins go back to Marcel Duchamp, who ‘reduced the creative act to a stunningly rudimentary level: to the single, intellectual, largely random decision to name this or that object or activity “art” … He used language and all manner of verbal and visual punning, randomness as well as deliberately plotted chance, trivial and ephemeral substances, his own person, provocative gestures directed at his own or other art, as the means and subjects of his work’ ( Roberta Smith, ‘Conceptual Art’ in Nikos Stangos, ed., Concepts of Modern Art, 1974, revised edn. 1981). His Fountain (1917), a urinal bowl with minimal alteration (see SOCIETY OF INDEPENDENT ARTISTS), can be considered the classic proto-Conceptual work. The artists who followed Duchamp in producing this kind of iconoclastic gesture include several figures who were prominent in the 1950s and early 1960s; among them were Piero Manzoni, whose contributions to art include cans of his own excrement, Yves Klein, who in 1958 held an exhibition consisting of an empty room at the Paris gallery of the Greek-born dealer Iris Clert (1925?– ), and Robert Rauschenberg, who in 1960—when invited to participate in an exhibition of portraits at the same gallery—sent a telegram saying ‘This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so'. However, it was not until the later 1960s that Conceptual art became a recognizable movement and acquired its name. The expression ‘Concept art’ was used by the American ‘anti-artist’ Henry Flynt (1940– ) in 1961, but the term ‘Conceptual art’ did not gain currency until Sol LeWitt's article ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ appeared in Artforum in 1967. LeWitt wrote that ‘In Conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work … all planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.’

The first major exhibitions of Conceptual art were held in 1969–70 in London, New York, and elsewhere, and the movement flourished most vigorously in the early 1970s, often overlapping with other art forms and movements that were fashionable at this time, notably Arte Povera, Body art, Land art, and Performance art. These have all been seen as aspects of Post-Minimalism—the reaction against the formalism and commercialism of Minimal art—and in the introduction to her anthology Conceptual Art (1972) the sculptor and critic Ursula Meyer stresses the unmaterialistic qualities of Conceptual art: ‘The shift from object to concept denotes disdain for the notion of commodities—the sacred cow of this culture. Conceptual artists propose a professional commitment that restores art to artists, rather than to the “money vendors”.’ However, Conceptual art has proved just as susceptible to commercial exploitation as other forms of avant-garde expression, with dealers selling the documentation of Conceptual works to collectors and museums. Such documentation takes varied forms, including photographs, sound and video cassettes, texts, maps, diagrams, and sets of instructions, but some Conceptual works do not have any physicality at all, an example being Telepathic Piece (1969) by the American artist Robert Barry (1936– ), consisting of a statement that ‘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'. He writes that ‘The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more. I prefer, simply, to state the existence of things in terms of time and/or space.’ Barry's other activities have included releasing small quantities of inert gases into the atmosphere and taking photographs of their dispersal (which is completely invisible).

Although some Conceptual art purports to deal with serious political issues (see HAACKE, for example), much of it is concerned with deliberately abstruse analysis of language (see ART & LANGUAGE) or with the kind of eccentric private concerns shown by Robert Barry. Exponents and admirers of Conceptual art see such activities as posing questions about the nature of art and provocatively expanding its boundaries. Robert Morris, for example, wrote in 1970 that ‘The detatchment of art's energy from the craft of tedious object production … refocuses art as an energy driving to change perception'. To many people, however, Conceptual art is as pointless as it is pretentious; in 1972 Keith Vaughan wrote that ‘the term is a contradiction in itself, art being the realization of concepts, not just having them'.

According to Roberta Smith's article cited above, ‘Conceptual Art probably was the largest, quickest-growing and most genuinely international of all twentieth-century art movements … due to its reliance on language, the reproducible image and the media, it was easily and quickly communicated … Almost every country in Europe, North and South America boasted some sort of serious Conceptual activity’ (opponents of Conceptual art would say that its proliferation owed much to the fact that it involved no perceptible skill and therefore could be done by anyone). However, the wave of enthusiasm for this kind of expression was fairly short-lived, and by the mid-1970s the term ‘Post-Conceptual’ was being used, suggesting that the movement had passed its peak (Roberta Smith writes that ‘Looking back from the beginning of the 1980s, the Conceptual “moment” seems to have ended somewhere around 1974 or 1975'). Conceptual art continued more sporadically for the next decade until there was a substantial revival of interest in it in the mid-1980s (for example in the work of some of the exponents of Neo-Geo). The term ‘Neo-Conceptual’ is sometimes applied to this revival.

Alternative names that have been used for Conceptual art include Anti-Object art, Dematerialized art, Documentary art, Head art, Idea art, and Post-Object art. The terms Analytical art and Ultra-Conceptualism are sometimes applied to Conceptual art that is concerned with philosophical enquiry into the concept of art. A journal called Analytical Art was published in Britain in 1971–2 (2 issues).