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On art theory and conceptual art:
Timothy McElreavy, Art Journal, Winter, 2002
Conceptual art never coalesced into a definable movement; the specific
interests, aims, and modes of production (if any) of its participants
were far too diverse for any kind of consensus. Nevertheless, the
term "Conceptual art" has come to characterize and categorize
the art-historical period that coincided with the social and cultural
upheavals of 1968, the Vietnam War, and the various battles for
equality and civil rights. We might think then of "Conceptual
art" as a tendency, a sensibility, an attitude, or even a practice,
but these terms have connotations of style, as if conceptual art
or "Conceptualism," to invoke a label with even greater
stylistic implications, was simply another kind of medium or format.
This was one of the art-historical dead ends that artists were trying
to escape, by means of a radical rethinking and dismantling of the
traditional art apparatus--from the entrenched market system of
value-obsessed collectors, dealers, and museum professionals to
the hegemony of the discrete object and the perceived cultural imperialism
of critics and art historians. History, however, has a way of ignoring
such insolent details, of weaving them seamlessly into its larger
narrative fabric.
... The object no longer mattered; it was merely the cumbersome
and distracting vehicle for the concept of art. Furthermore, that
concept, for these artists, had precious little to do with historical
notions of the artwork and its usual materials and everything to
do with the use and manipulation of language. This was art's linguistic
turn. And so card files; loose-leaf notebooks; photocopied dictionary
definitions; miscellaneous measurements; demonstrations of otherwise
imperceptible natural processes; bottled air; empty space; statements
of intent; banal documentation of cultural, social, and economic
situations; time-stamped postcards; and directions for mundane tasks
came to represent some of the more concrete types of work produced
during this period, which relied almost exclusively on language,
either written or spoken, for their articulation. Through such works,
as well as manifesto-like texts, artists claimed to purify art--or
rather the idea of art--of all that sullied its clarity and precision
(for example, materiality, facture, wealth, institutional power,
and history). It is precisely these claims to purity, both philosophically
and historically, that make the more extreme examples of conceptual
art and rhetoric contained in this volume all the more interesting,
at least in terms of the stakes and implications of such practices.
On disillusionment:
Daniel Kunitz, Harper's Magazine, August, 2002
...No fewer than two generations of American artists were taught
that the Romantic ideal of the heroic artist died sometime during
the latter half of the twentieth century, that along with the author
the artist was an outdated concept in a world governed by unconscious
structures. Andy Warhol said he wanted to be a machine, not an artist.
Far from bringing audiences and art together, arrangements of found
objects and work that mimics the "fast-take, quick-buck culture,"
whether they be kitsch or art-as-entertainment, serve as ways of
distancing the pastime that art has become from the religious taint
of creation and from the hedonistic, Romantic value of imagination.
Many artists no longer want to be artists; they only want the status
the term confers. ... The conceptualist Mel Chin, from the section
on Consumption, ceased making things with his hands (drawing, sculpture),
because he wanted to abandon "some delusional idea of what
it meant to be an artist." Comparing Knowmad, Chin's video
game (which he hired others to design), with a Delacroix or an Ingres,
one has to wonder whose ideas are delusional.
On summing up:
Edward Lucie-Smith, from Art in the Seventies, Phaidon, 1980
The art of the 70s has been difficult for the public to absorb,
because it often seemed that one must hold the whole history of
modern art in one’s head in order to comprehend it...The critics
in particular are those whose ideas and standards have been formed
during the period 1945-70. It is they who have been brought up on
the idea of a dialogue of styles--first Abstract Expressionism and
Art Autre; then Pop, Op and Kinetic; finally Minimal, Conceptual,
Earth Art and Body Art. Yet much of the most interesting work done
during the 70s does not fit into this pattern....it is now possible
to speak of ‘the end of Modernism” One can go further
still, and say that artists of the 70s, sometimes without meaning
to do so, have overturned a whole system of categories.
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