Beginnings of Conceptual Art

"No matter what form [the artwork] may finally have it must begin with an idea. It is the process of conception
and realization with which the artist is concerned."

One of the most important precedents for Conceptual art was the work of Dada artist Marcel Duchamp, who in
the early-20th century established the idea of the "readymade" - the found object that is simply nominated or
chosen by the artist to be a work of art, without adaptations to the object beyond a signature. The first and most
famous true Readymade was Fountain (1917), which was nothing more than a porcelain urinal, reoriented ninety
degrees, placed on a stand and signed and dated under the alias "R. Mutt." Duchamp described his Readymades
as "anti-retinal," and dismissed the popular conception that works of art need demonstrate artistic skill. In the
1950s, long after several of his original Readymades had been lost, Duchamp re-issued Fountain and other
Readymades for the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. These acts sparked a resurgence of interest in his work,
which not only brought the emergence of Neo-Dada led by John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns,
but also rekindled a widespread interest in idea-based art throughout the contemporary art world.

Fluxus and Minimalism to Conceptualism

While the late 1950s witnessed modern art's progressive shift from Abstract Expressionism to Neo-Dada and
Pop, the late 1960s witnessed a similar shift, only this time from Fluxus and Minimalism to Conceptualism.
Fluxus began in the early sixties, and has many affinities with Dada. Embracing "flux", or change, as an essential
element of life, Fluxus artists aimed to integrate art and life, using any found objects and sounds, simple
activities and situations as stimuli. George Maciunas, Allan Kaprow, and composer John Cage are important
Fluxus figures who impacted Conceptual art.

Adding to Conceptual art's diverse genealogy, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Robert Morris and other Minimalist
artists who emerged in the mid-1960s extended modernist abstraction by embracing repetition, formal
simplification, and industrial fabrication of their artworks. Judd and others rejected much that was traditional
in creating works that occupied space differently, often on a scale too large for a pedestal or home, and usually
made of nontraditional artistic materials like bricks or sheets of steel, the production of which was outsourced.
A number of burgeoning artists during this time paid close attention to the paradigm shifts inherent in Fluxus
and Minimalism, seeing that a so-called work of art was not dependent upon the object/work itself, and that it
could therefore exist chiefly as an idea. Most saw their works in direct defiance of the art market, with its
promotion of artistic personalities and rare and original "masterpieces."

LeWitt's "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art"

In 1967, Sol LeWitt published "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" (considered by many to be the movement's
manifesto), in which he wrote: "What the work of art looks like isn't too important. It has to look like something
if it has physical form. No matter what form it may finally have it must begin with an idea. It is the process of
conception and realization with which the artist is concerned." The notion of placing concept before object, and
the value of realization over any aesthetic concerns importantly contradicted the theories and writings of
formalist art critics like Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Their work rather focused chiefly on the
examination of objects, materials, colors and forms - had helped to define the aesthetic criteria of the preceding
generation of artists.

Wiener's "Declaration of Intent"

Conceptual art was taken to the extremes of art as idea by Lawrence Weiner in his 1968 "Declaration of Intent,"
which declared he would cease the practice of creating physical art, citing no need to build something when the
idea behind any work of art should suffice, since the artist's intent remains the same (or should, ideally),
regardless of whether the work is in physical form or merely conceptual.

The Formation of the Movement

While conceptualist artists forever remained a disparate, international group harboring a great many ideas
about contemporary art, by the late 1960s it was somewhat evident that a loose movement was coalescing. In
1968 a series of Conceptual art exhibitions vigorously promoted the movement in New York, put together by the
dealer and curator Seth Siegelaub. In 1969, New York's Museum of Modern Art gathered a number of artists
from the movement for an exhibition titled "Information." This event was not to be taken without a grain of salt,
since Conceptualism was largely critical of the institutional museum system and its market-driven interests, the
system within which they exhibited.

Artist Collectives Emerge

In 1967, a collective of British artists formed the group Art & Language while teaching art in Coventry, England.
Through a series of published journals the group showed an outspoken distaste for entanglement of modern art
and the marketplace. Over the next several years many would join the group, whose rotating membership
would reach approximately 50 artists before its dwindling in the late 1970s.

Other artist collectives were similarly political in their focus. The Canadian group General Idea had a small
membership of three artists, Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal, and AA Bronson, who embraced ephemeral works and
installations. Active from 1967 to 1994, in the 1980s their works addressed the pharmaceutical industry and the
AIDS crisis. In South America, artists found Conceptualism an effective pathway to creativity and political
opposition. Conceptualism was particularly appealing there as it was not an imported style per se, but rather a
means of expression with no single frame of reference, whether cultural, aesthetic, or ideological. Artist
collectives provided anonymity, and thus protection from prosecution by oppressive authorities, and the
opportunity to make strong social statements. The Chilean group CADA (Art Action Collective) and the
Peruvian group Parenthesis exemplified this trend.

Conceptual Art: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

Conceptual art was conceived as a movement that extended traditional boundaries, and hence it can be difficult
to distinguish self-conscious Conceptualism from the various other developments in art of the 1960s.
Conceptualism could take the form of tendencies such as happenings, performance art, installation, body art,
and earth art. The principle that united these developments was the rejection of traditional ways of judging
works of art, the opposition to art being a commodity, and the belief in the essentially conceptual nature of all
works of art. Because it circumvented aesthetics, it is difficult to define conceptual art on stylistic grounds other
than a delivery that seems objective and unemotional. While a conceptual work may possess no particular style,
one could say that this everyday appearance and this diversity of expression are characteristics of the movement.

Art as Idea

Among the first to pursue the notion of idea-based art to its logical conclusion was Joseph Kosuth, who evolved
a highly analytical model premised on the notion that art must continually question its own purpose.
Advocating his ideas most famously in a three-part essay entitled "Art after Philosophy" (1969), Kosuth argued
that it was necessary to abandon traditional media in order to pursue this self-criticism. He questioned the
notion that art necessarily needed to be manifested in a visual form - indeed, whether it needed to be
manifested in any physical form at all. Many, like Lawrence Weiner, similarly stated the need to relinquish the
practice of creating physical works of art. By striving to minimize the materiality of art, artists strove to remove
aesthetic criteria and the commodity status out of the artistic equation. The "dematerialization of art object," as
the art critic Lucy Lippard described the tendency in the chronicle of Conceptualism (Six Years: the
Dematerialization of the Art Object), thus had a subtle political undercurrent. Conceptual art ideas often evoked
dispersal (instead of formation), and voiding (instead of creation), and many of the Conceptual artistic ideas
were open-ended propositions that lacked foregone conclusions. For instance, Lawrence Weiner's "Statements"
of 1968 include "A field created by structured simultaneous TNT explosions" and "One standard dye marker
thrown into the sea," and epitomize the open-ended and hence anti-authoritarian stance of the movement. As
Wiener explained in his "Declaration of Intent" (1968-9), "Art that imposes conditions - human or otherwise - on
the receiver for its appreciation in my eyes constitutes aesthetic fascism."
Language as Art

Although the use of text in art was nothing new by the 1960s - text appears alongside other visual elements in
Cubist paintings, for example - artists such as Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, Ed Ruscha, and John Baldessari
adopted text as the chief element of a visual work of art. Unlike their predecessors, this generation had pursued
college degrees, which in part accounts for their intellectualism and the influence of recent studies in
linguistics. The language used was meant to signify itself and an artistic idea. Text-based art would often use
abstract formulations, often in the form of abrupt commands, ambiguous statements, or just a single word to
create associations for the viewer. While first-wave conceptualists like Weiner and Baldessari remain active
today, they inspired younger artists from Jenny Holzer to Tracey Emin to continue the practice of language-
based art and to push the boundaries of art and its definitions.

Anti-commodification and Institutional Critique

If Conceptual art had a central tenet that united all artists under one banner, it was surely their shared
discomfort with the institutionalized state of the art world, as arbiter of constituted "good" vs. "bad" art. The
artistic gatekeepers had been guided largely by market concerns since the mid-nineteenth century, such that
"good" art was marketable, and "bad" art was not. The beneficiaries of this system were a small group of (mostly
male and white) artists, and members of an elite social class who sold and collected the work, or who
participated in the administration of museums. In the 1960s, there was the sense that if art catered to this world
then it will surely not strive to challenge any status quo, or be avant-garde. Conceptual artists and theorists
looked closely at modern art practices and trends during the 1960s and early 1970s, seeking forms of radical
theory or aesthetics, but found largely a continuation of abstract, post-abstract and minimalist motifs. "What
can you expect to challenge in the real world," wrote Burn in the pages of Artforum in 1975, "with 'color', 'edge',
'process', systems, modules, etc. as your arguments? Can you be any more than a manipulated puppet if these
are your 'professional' arguments?"

The late 1960s witnessed the emergence of a form of Conceptualism that has come to be known as institutional
critique, practiced by artists such as Hans Haacke, Michael Asher, Daniel Buren, and Marcel Broodthaers.
Institutional critique continued the tradition of idea-based art, but usually in the form of installations that
implicitly questioned the assumed function of the museum--i.e. preservation and exhibition of masterpieces -
by providing a view to its greater role within society at large (eg. as arbiter of taste, as investor, as tax shelter, and
gatekeeper to artistic success). The museum is not a neutral hall for the exhibition of works and education of the
public. Rather, it is invested in promoting certain artists, in selecting "important" works of art, and in shaping the
economic reality that benefits its trustees and the established art world. The inherent complexity of institutional
critique is that it was often staged within the very institutions that artists were critiquing, as with Hans Haacke's
MoMA Poll (1970). At times, the success of a particular work relied on the participation of viewers, thus
demonstrating that the work, like the "art world" includes viewers as well as artists and the institutions that host
them. Thus it is important to note that rather than simply negating or rejecting the institution, these artists
often implicated themselves, and sought to bring awareness to complex fabric of social and institutional
relations.

Challenges to Authorship

When Marcel Duchamp nominated a urinal as a work of art and reissued later editions of his Readymades, he
delivered clear blows to the West's collective notion of artistic creativity. In keeping with this model, Sol LeWitt's
"Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" advocated the idea that the work need not necessarily be fully 'authored' by the
artist. "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 idea
of an automated or machine-like execution of the art-idea is symptomatic of Conceptualism at large. For
instance, in Vito Acconci's Following Piece (1969), the artist subjected his vision to an outside force: the random
movements of strangers that he followed on the street until they disappeared into private space. The parameters
of the work (the goal, the documentation method) were decided in advance by Acconci, but the resulting path
traversed and subjects (the exact people, number of photographs, specific locations, etc.) occured based on the
decisions made by randomly selected individuals and were thus exempt from Acconci's agency.

This denial of the artist as "master" and sole creator of the work also translates to many posthumous works with
which the artist's name is associated, but where he/she is not the fabricator. LeWitt in particular, who passed
away in 2007, was survived by a number of unrealized sketches for sculptural and other works of art, which to
this day are often created anew by teams of fabricators and assistants, thus allowing brand new LeWitt works to
be made even while the artist is dead. Such fabrication in the name of the artist echoes prior modern art
practices, particularly in sculpture (the estate of Auguste Rodin is a well-known example of posthumous artistic
production). While authorship is, strictly speaking, a component of LeWitt's posthumously issued works, the
practice flies in the face of traditional notions of craft and mastery.

Photo-conceptualism

Photo-conceptualism is a persistent trend associated with Conceptualism. Conceptual artists often relied on
documentation of their ideas, and photography was a convenient means to this end. Photography could be
integrated into the concept or system that the artist devised, just as a diagram or a text could illustrate it. In this
sense, the documentation is the work of art, and vice versa, and because of this the usual hierarchical distinction
between "work" and "document" - where the former is considered more important than the latter - is undone. In
counter distinction to many photographers, Conceptualists were not concerned with photographic quality,
whether determined by the print, composition, lighting, or editing. Furthermore, their dryly objective approach
resulted in photographs that prevent access to the artist's personality, and which prevent a strong emotional
response from the viewer. Edward Ruscha's matter-of-fact photographs of "Every Building on the Sunset Strip,"
which he methodically produced with a camera strapped to his pickup truck exemplify this artistically anti-
expressive approach to creating photo-conceptual works.

Later Developments - After Conceptual Art

Although the model of Conceptual art promoted by Joseph Kosuth and Art & Language might be seen as the
epitome of the movement - others explored avenues that were arguably as influential. Conceptual art
sidestepped conventions of craftsmanship and style to an extent that it could be said to place renewed emphasis
on content, which had been largely banished under critical emphasis on form. Emergent during a period of
major social upheaval, Conceptualism's central tenant - that the idea is paramount - found broad application by
artists wishing to emphasize diverse social issues. The social issues addressed by international artists such as
Hans Haacke, Martha Rosler, Jenny Holzer, Luis Caminzer, Alfredo Jaar, and Ai Weiwei, include labor and
gender relations, museum stewardship, and poverty and censorship.

While the movement often emphasized the social construction of the work of art, Conceptualism was not
populist and had limited popularity outside of the art world due to its arcane perception. Furthermore, fractures
began to develop in the movement by the mid-1970s, leading to the dissolution of the movement. Yet, it
eventually became inspiration to subsequent post-Conceptual artists, many of whom embraced the material
basis of art and the language of visual culture, such as the Pictures Generation led by Cindy Sherman and
Richard Prince. Others continued to sidestep traditional artistic production through Performance art or
installations. Thus, many of the concerns, and something of its austere style and tactics endure to this day in the
works of a wide variety of artists, including Andrea Fraser, Tino Sehgal, Gabriel Orozco, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Glen
Ligon, and Damien Hirst.

Most Important Art

One and Three Chairs (1965)
Artist: Joseph Kosuth

A physical chair sits between a scale photograph of a chair and a printed definition of the word "chair." Emblematic of
Conceptual art, One and Three Chairs makes people question what constitutes the "chair" - the physical object, the idea,
the photograph, or a combination of all three. Joseph Kosuth once wrote, "The art I call conceptual is such because it is
based on an inquiry into the nature of art. Thus, it is...a thinking out of all the implications, of all aspects of the concept
'art.'" One and Three Chairs denies the hierarchical distinction between an object and a representation, just as it implies a
conceptual work of art can be object or representation in its various forms. This work harks back to and also extends the
kind of inquiry into the presumed priority of object over representation that had been earlier proposed by the Surrealist
René Magritte in his Treachery of Images (1928-9), with its image of a pipe over the inscription "Ceci n'est pas un pipe" (This
is not a pipe).

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Conceptual Art Artworks in Focus: