What is conceptual art

Over the next several years many would join the group, whose rotating membership would reach approximately 50 artists before its dwindling in the late s. Other artist collectives were similarly political in their focus. Active from to , in the s 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. 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 s.

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.

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" , 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 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" , "Art that imposes conditions - human or otherwise - on the receiver for its appreciation in my eyes constitutes aesthetic fascism. Although the use of text in art was nothing new by the s - 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.

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. 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 s, 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 s and early s, seeking forms of radical theory or aesthetics, but found largely a continuation of abstract, post-abstract and minimalist motifs.

Can you be any more than a manipulated puppet if these are your 'professional' arguments? The late s 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. 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 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. 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.

The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. For instance, in Vito Acconci's Following Piece , 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. Social sculpture is a theory developed by the artist Joseph Beuys in the s based on the concept that everything ….

John Miller. In response to this …. Jessica Morgan. In this interview, Tate Modern curator Jessica Morgan asks conceptual art pioneer John Baldessari, where did your ideas come from? Enter the fantastical world of the Kabakovs in the first major UK exhibition dedicated to these pioneers of installation art.

Main menu additional Become a Member Shop. Art Term Conceptual art Conceptual art is art for which the idea or concept behind the work is more important than the finished art object. Twitter Facebook Email Pinterest. Related terms and concepts Left Right. Fluxus Fluxus is an international avant-garde collective or network of artists and composers founded in thes and still continuing today. Conceptual photography Conceptual photography is photography that illustrates an idea.

Land art Land art or earth art is art that is made directly in the landscape, sculpting the land itself into earthworks ….

Performance art Artworks that are created through actions performed by the artist or other participants, which may be live or recorded, spontaneous ….

Arte povera Arte povera was a radical Italian art movement from the late s to s whose artists explored a range of …. Social sculpture Social sculpture is a theory developed by the artist Joseph Beuys in the s based on the concept that everything …. Body art Body art is art in which the body, often that of the artist, is the principal medium and focus.

Selected artists working with conceptual art Left Right. Mary Kelly born An amalgam of various tendencies rather than a tightly cohesive movement, Conceptualism took myriad forms, such as performances, happenings, and ephemera.

From the mids through the mids Conceptual artists produced works and writings that completely rejected standard ideas of art. Their chief claim - that the articulation of an artistic idea suffices as a work of art - implied that concerns such as aesthetics, expression, skill and marketability were all irrelevant standards by which art was usually judged. So drastically simplified, it might seem to many people that what passes for Conceptual art is not in fact "art" at all, much as Jackson Pollock's "drip" paintings, or Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes , seemed to contradict what previously had passed for art.

But it is important to understand Conceptual art in a succession of avant-garde movements Cubism , Dada , Abstract Expressionism , Pop , etc.

Conceptualists put themselves at the extreme end of this avant-garde tradition. In truth, it is irrelevant whether this extremely intellectual kind of art matches one's personal views of what art should be, because the fact remains that Conceptual artists successfully redefine the concept of a work of art to the extent that their efforts are widely accepted as art by collectors, gallerists, and museum curators.

One of the main theorists of Conceptual art, Sol Lewitt said "Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form.

All ideas need not be made physical. In Robert Rauschenberg visited Willem de Kooning's loft, requesting one of de Kooning's drawings to completely erase it. Rauschenberg believed that in order for this idea to become a work of art, the work had to be someone else's and not his own; if he erased one of his own drawings then the result would be nothing more than a negated drawing.

Although disapproving at first, de Kooning understood the concept and reluctantly consented to hand over something that he de Kooning would miss and that would be a challenge to erase entirely, thus making the erasure that much more profound in the end.

It took Rauschenberg a little over a month and an estimated fifteen erasers to "finish" the work. The absent drawing is a Conceptual work avant la lettre , and a precursor to works like Sol Lewitt's Buried Cube Containing an Object of Importance but Little Value , a gag piece, where LeWitt supposedly interred a simple cube in a collector's yard, and with it he buried Minimalism's object-centered approach.

A physical chair sits between a scale photograph of a chair and a printed definition of the word "chair. 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 The idea underlying this piece was the creation of an actual yet invisible work of art. With the help of an industrial drill, de Maria dug a narrow hole in the ground exactly one kilometer deep, inserted a two-inch diameter brass rod of the same length, then concealed it with a sandstone plate.

A small hole was cut in the plate's center to reveal a small portion of the rod, which is perfectly level with the ground. The result is a permanent work of art that people are forced to imagine but may never actually see.

As a complementary piece to Vertical Earth Kilometer , de Maria created the far more visible Broken Kilometer , which consisted of five hundred two-meter-long brass rods, neatly arranged on an exhibition floor space in five parallel rows of one hundred rods each. In keeping with Conceptual artists' dispensation of traditional materials and formal concerns, this work defies the marketplace: it can't be sold or entirely exhibited. Further, its simplicity and largely concealed quality makes it anti-expressive and consistent with the period's many paradoxical negations of the visual in "visual art.

Content compiled and written by Justin Wolf. Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors. The Art Story. Ways to support us. Conceptual Art Started: Mid s. It is the process of conception and realization with which the artist is concerned. If they keep it in their heads, that's fine too.