What is Conceptual Art

Conceptual Art

What is Conceptual Art?

Tony Godfrey

Conceptual art is not about form or material, but about ideas and meaning. It cannot be defined as any medium or style, but is more related to its view of what art is, especially conceptual art that challenges the traditional status of art objects as unique, collectible or tradable. The work no longer appears in a traditional form and requires a more active response from the audience. In fact, conceptual art does not only exist in the participation of the audience's minds. This art takes various forms: daily objects, photography, maps, videos, diagrams, and especially language itself. These forms are often combined as well. Conceptual art played a decisive role in the thinking of most artists by proposing a radical critique of art, its representations and the way they are used.

The art of the 20th century has been regarded as something that we should admire and respect, and has been praised to the highest degree. To question this, as conceptual art does, is to question the fundamental values ??of our culture and society. In recent years, art museums have taken on many aspects of the role of a church or temple: the solemnity of pilgrimage, the idolatry of maintaining and guarding its sacred objects. These are precisely the things that conceptual artists happily exploited, whether it was an outspoken rebuke of such institutions, as in the case of Henry Flynt's anti-museum movement of 1963, or an outspoken rebuke of such institutions, as in the case of Joseph Kosuth's Joseph Kosuth and Fred Wilson, a more cumbersome deconstruction of the museum enterprise.

Conceptual art can be said to have reached its peak and fallen into crisis at the same time between 1966 and 1972. The term first came into widespread use around 1967, but it is questionable whether some forms of conceptual art persisted throughout the twentieth century. The earliest works are often considered to be the so-called "readymades" of French artist Marcel Duchamp, the most notorious of which is "Fountain". A urinal placed on the base of the statue and signed R. Mutt. Duchamp sent it as a work of art to the "Society of Independent Artists Exhibition" held in New York in 1917. out. Before The Fountain, there was little to get people thinking about what art actually was, or how it was expressed; they simply assumed that art was either painting or sculpture. But few would consider Fountain to be a sculpture.

A work of art usually functions as a statement: "This is a statue of Michelangelo's Old Testament hero David", or "This is a Mona Lisa." "Portrait of Shakespeare". We can certainly ask questions like: "Why did Michelangelo make David twice the size?" or "Who is this Mona Lisa?" But these questions come from a kind of understanding of the work of art. The default of the initial conditions assumed. We see it as an art of representation and "talking about things". But the readymade is different in that it is posed not as a statement, "This is a urinal," but as a question or a challenge, "Could this urinal be a work of art? Think of it as art." !" Or, Duchamp's "LHOOQ": "Try to think of this replica of the bearded Mona Lisa as a work of art, not just a destroyed copy of a work of art, It is an independent work of art!"

Some of the issues raised by conceptual artists in the late 1960s had been foreseen by Marcel Duchamp 50 years ago, and in a certain way To a certain extent, it was also foreseen by Dada’s anti-art stance since 1916. They would be quoted again 20 years after the end of World War II, and extended by a wide range of artists, including the neo-Dadaists and the Minimalists. As we have seen, these questions would be fully developed and theorized by the generation of artists who emerged in the late sixties, and whose work must lie at the heart of any study of conceptual art. Subsequently, most of them continued to develop their work, while a new generation of artists utilized the strategies of conceptual art to interpret their experience of the world. The question of whether we should consider this type of work as late conceptual, post-conceptual or neo-conceptual art remains unresolved. Conceptual art has always been an international phenomenon. In the sixties, you could probably find it in Santiago, Prague and Buenos Aires as well as New York. Since New York was the center of artistic distribution and promotion during this period, the art created there has always been the most discussed. I would prefer to redress the balance to some extent.

If it doesn't depend on medium or style, how do you identify a conceptual piece of art when you're faced with it? Generally speaking, it may take four forms: A Readymade, a term invented by Duchamp to refer to an object brought in from the outside world, declared or proposed as art, and thus At the same time, it denies the uniqueness of art and the necessity of manual operation by the artist; an intervention, in which some images, words or objects are placed in an unexpected environment, thus drawing people's attention to this Environment: such as a museum or street; Documentation, in which real works, ideas, or activities can only be expressed through evidence of records, maps, charts, or photographs; Words, in which ideas, claims, or investigations are expressed in expressed in the form of language.

Duchamp's "Fountain" is the most famous or notorious example of a ready-made, but its strategy has been adopted and adapted by many artists. An example of an intervention is the billboard project by American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which features a photo of a blank double bed covered with wrinkled sheets. was displayed on twenty-four billboards throughout New York City. What does this mean? It has no caption. It can mean many things to someone passing by, depending on his or her personal circumstances. It's about love and absence: double beds are usually shared between lovers. Many of us see it in the morning before going to work. What is shown here is an intimate scene, and it is placed in a place where everyone can see it. The background or original meaning of it naturally becomes an essential and critical part of its meaning. Perhaps some passers-by would be able to identify the work of González-Torres and guess that, for him, it was the bed he used with his lover, Luce, who had recently died of AIDS. But this specific personal meaning is not prescribed; meaning is what each of us finds in it.

Duchamp's "Fountain" is the most famous or notorious example of a ready-made, but its strategy has been adopted and adapted by many artists. An example of an intervention is the billboard project by American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which features a photo of a blank double bed covered with wrinkled sheets. was displayed on twenty-four billboards throughout New York City. What does this mean? It has no caption. It can mean many things to someone passing by, depending on his or her personal circumstances. It's about love and absence: double beds are usually shared between lovers. Many of us see it in the morning before going to work. What is shown here is an intimate scene, and it is placed in a place where everyone can see it. The background or original meaning of it naturally becomes an essential and critical part of its meaning. Perhaps some passers-by would be able to identify the work of González-Torres and guess that, for him, it was the bed he used with his lover, Luce, who had recently died of AIDS. But this specific personal meaning is not prescribed; meaning is what each of us finds in it.

Joseph Kosuth's "One and Three Chairs" is an example of a document in which the real work is the concept - "What is a chair?" And then there's "What is Art?" and "What is expression?" It seems like a repetition of synonyms: a chair is a chair is a chair, as he declares, "Art is art is art." The three elements we can actually see (a picture of a chair, a real chair and the definition of a chair) are all subordinate to this concept. They have no value in themselves: it's an ordinary chair, its definition was photocopied from a dictionary, and the photo wasn't even taken by Joseph Kosuth himself - it had never been touched by the artist's hands. Pass.

California artist Bruce Nauman's "One Hundred Lives and Deaths" is a classic example of expression through words. The audience, like babbling children, is asked to rehearse a series of paired phrases that become increasingly jarring and turbulent. It is composed of neon tubes, a medium familiar to us in store signs, and used at this scale adds a disturbing aura to the gallery.

However, we must guard against a classification that is considered anathema to conceptual artists. The possible meanings of the above four categories of works, to which we are about to return, are more important. Many conceptual works do not necessarily fit into any definite genre, just as many conceptual artists resist any restrictive definition of their work. Their frequent objection to the museum lies in the classification it adheres to: often with absurd consequences.

When Joseph Corsuth's "One and Three Chairs" was withdrawn from the exhibition halls, the major museums that owned the work claimed that they could not determine where to store the work because there was no "Conceptual Art" department, so There was no designated storage area, and in the end, it was stored in three places according to the logic of the museum: the chair was stored in the design department, the photo of the chair in the photography department, and the photocopied definition from the dictionary was stored in the library ! So, in effect, they can only store it by destroying it.

If a conceptual work of art begins with the question "what is art?" rather than a certain style or medium, one wonders whether it boils down to the assertion "this could be art": "This "Refers to any object, image, action, or idea that is revealed in some other way. Conceptual art is therefore "reflexive": the object refers back to the subject itself, such as a sentence like "I'm thinking about how I think", which represents a continuous state of self-criticism.