‘Concept’ Art and Conceptual Aspects

Abstract

Del arte objetual al arte de concepto by Simón Marchán Fiz has been called one of the most important books on contemporary published in Spanish in the 1970s. This chapter from the book gives a broad yet detailed survey of the genealogy, philosophy and practice of Conceptual art in the US and Europe in the 1960s and early 1970sd.

Keywords:

• Conceptual art
• visual perception
• linguistic philosophy
• commodification
• decommodification
• new media
• Gottlob Frege
• Alfred North Whitehead
• Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Rudolf Carnap
• A. J. Ayer Bertrand Russell
• Herbert Marcuse
• Joseph Kosuth
• Carl Andre
• Donald Judd
• Dan Flavin
• Sol Lewitt
• Robert Morris, Bernar Venet
• Donald Burgy
• Art & Language group
• Victor Burgin
• Jan Dibbets
• Alain Kirili
• Klaus Staeck
• Hanne Darboven
• Agnes Denes
• On Kawara
• Shusaku Arakawa
• Douglas Huebler
• Arrowsmith
• and
• most notably
• Bernd and Hilla Becher
• Guerrilla Art Action Group

Notes

1 Art after Philosophy, see Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art (New York: E. P. Dutton), 161–2.

2 “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (1967): 80.

3 Arte de Sistemas (Buenos Aires: Centro de arte y comunicación, 1971).

4 See André Lalande, Vocabulario técnico y crítico de la filosofía (Buenos Aires: Librería Ateneo, 1967), 166–7; Nicola Abbagnano Diccionario de la filosofía (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1963), 193 ff; Ferrater Mora, Diccionario de Filosofía, 5th ed. (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1965).

5 Excerpts from Speculation, in Meyer, Conceptual Art, p. 50.

6 See Catherine Millet, “L’art conceptuel comme sémiotique de l’art,” VH 101, 3 (1970): 15 ff.

7 Alain Kirili Passage du concept comme forme d’art aux travaux d’analyse, VH 101, 3 (1970), p. 39.

8 See Klaus Groh, If I had a Mind… (Ich stelle mir vor …): concept-art, project art (Cologne: DuMont Aktuell, 1971).

9 According to some, most notably Catherine Millet, Conceptualist orthodoxy is limited to J. Kosuth (born between 1938-48), Art & Language (T. Atkinson, 1939), M. Baldwin (1945), D. Bainbridge (1941), H. Hurrel (1940), C. Koslow, V. Burgin (1941), A. Kirili (1946), On Kawara (1933), B. Venet (1941), E. Prini (1943), A. Lecci (1938), J. Baldessari (1931), almost all the artists who participated in the 1970 exhibition «Concept-Théorie». Analytical Art (P. Pilkington, D. Rushton, P. Smith, C. Willsmore), The Society for Theorical Art and Analysis in New York (J. Burn, Mel Ramsden and R. Cutforth), K. Arnatt (1930), D. Dye (1945), D. Askevold (1940), A. Denes.

10 “Entretien avec Art-Langage”, in Catherine Millet, Textes sur l’art Conceptual, 41; and “Note sur Art-Language,” ibid., 31–6.

11 Harald Szeemann, Documenta 5, exhibition catalogue (Kassel: Documenta GmbH, 1972), 17–18.

12 Lecher System, in Meyer, Conceptual Art, 22–5.

13 Quoted Meyer, Conceptual Art, 21.

14 See “Stating and Nominating,” VH 101, no. 5 (1971), and “Excerpts from The Grammarian” (1970), in Meyer, Conceptual Art, 96–103.

15 See Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden, “Excerpts from The Grammarian” (1970), in Meyer, Conceptual Art, 100–2.

16 See Joseph Kosuth, The Sixth Investigation, Art as Idea asIidea: Proposition II (Buenos Aires: Centro de arte y comunicación, 1971), 174–5. Note the following from “Special Investigation”: “1. A logician, who eats porkchops for supper, will probably lose money; 2. A gambler, whose appetite is not ravenous, will probably lose money; 3. A man who is depressed, having lost money and being likely to lose more, always rises at 5 a. m.; 4. A man, who neither gambles nor eats pork-chops for supper, is sure to have a ravenous appetite, etc …”.

17 Joseph Kosuth, “Note introductive,” VH 101, no. 3 (1970): 53.

18 Joseph Kosuth, “Art after philosophy”, ibid., 163.

19 Ibid., 165.

20 Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy,” ibid., 164–5.

21 Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: “A tautology has no truth-conditions, since it is unconditionally true: and a contradiction is true on no condition”; “Tautologies and contradictions are not pictures of reality. They do not represent any possible situations (…) In a tautology the conditions of agreement with the world – the representational relations – cancel one another, so that it does not stand in any representational relation to reality.” Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.461 and 4.462.

22 Joseph Kosuth, “Art after philosophy”: 170.

23 On this subject, cf. Renato Barilli, “Le due anime del concettuale,” Op. cit., no. 26 (1973): 78–9.

24 For various concrete examples, see Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, from 1966 to 1972, 14, 21, 33, 37, 105, 171-2, 186-7, 192, 219, 225, 228, etc., Meyer, Conceptual Art, 9–21, 27, 32, 62–3, 79, 96 ff., 122 ff., 155, 200, 207; Catherine Millet “L'utilisation du langage dans l'art Conceptual”, in Texts sur l’Art Conceptuel (Paris: Templeton, 1972), 25–30; Italo Tomassoni, “Dall'oggetto al concetto. Elogio della tautologia,” Flash Art, no. 28–9 (1971–72): 14–15.

25 Catherine Millet, “B. Venet, la fonction didactique de l'art Conceptual”, Texts sur l’Art Conceptuel, 57–61; Flash Art, nos. 18 and 20 (1970).

26 Cf. Lucy Lippard, Six Years, pp. 107–8.

27 Cf. Lucy Lippard, Six Years, pp. 107–8; Catherine Millet “Victor Burgin, Langage, perception et fonction représentative”, in Textes sur l’art conceptuel, Charles Harrison, Art as Idea from England 1971, page unknown. “1. All criteria by which you might decide that any series of bodily acts, directly known to you at any moment previous to the present moment, constitutes a discrete event. 2. All criteria by which you might assess the similarity of any one event to any other event… 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14” or “0. A period of interruption during an intentional bodily act, 1, 2, 3, 4. 5. 6. 7. 8, 9: The termination of 0”. The propositions are devised according to analogies and links.

28 See Meyer, Conceptual Art, 220–1.

29 Robert Barry Arte de sistemas, CAYC, page unknown.

30 Lawrence Weiner, “The artist may construct the piece; the piece may be fabricated; the piece need not be built. Each [sic] being equal…”, Meyer, Conceptual Art, 218.

31 Quoted in Lippard, Six Years, 131.

32 Wittgenstein, Tractatus lógico-philosophicus, 5, 62.

33 “Dall'oggeto al concetto,” Flash Art, no. 28–29 (1971–72): 14.

34 Adam Schaff, Introducción a la semántica (Mexico City: FCE, 1966), 63–97.

35 Quelques aspects de l'art bourgeois: La non intervention, Robho, no. 5–6 (1971): 36; see also Max Kozloff, “The trouble with Art-as-Idea”, Artforum, September (1972): 33–7, and the response from Preston Heller and Andrew Menard, “Kozloff: Criticism in absentia,” ibid., February (1973): 32–6.

36 Sol LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art”, in Meyer Conceptual Art, 174.

37 Henry Flynt, “Concept Art, in An Anthology (New York, 1963).

38 Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 6, 522.

39 Quoted in in Meyer, Conceptual Art, 40.

40 Others artists who work in this vein include: D. Buren, R. Long, M. Harvey (1944), D. Lamelas (1944), A. Ruppersberg (1944), M. Kirby (1931), D. Dye, Arrowsmith, P. Berry (1946), L. Burkhardt (1937), H. Distel (1942), W. Ernst (1942), M. Mannucci (1939), P. Vogel (1939), M. Verstockt (1930), T. Ulrichs, J. Gerz, E. Prini, W. Aue, W. Sorensen, A. Heibel, H. Koetsier, B. Demattio, A. Distel, D. Rot, Arakawa, etc.

41 Situational Aesthetics, in Meyer, Conceptual Art, 79, 81.

42 Arakawa Mechanismus der Bedeutung (Munich: Bruckmann, 1971); J. M. Bonet, “Arakawa”, Nueva Lente: 50–54 (1973).

43 Mel Bochner, “Problematics Aspects of Critical/Mathematic Constructs in My Art,” Studio International, April (1971); Mel Bochner “The Constant as Variable,” Artforum, December (1972): 28–34.

44 See Jacques Berloin, Semiologie graphique (Paris: Mouton, 1967).

45 See accounts by Buren, Barry, Dibbets, Heubler, etc. in Lippard, Six Years, 52, 72, 89, 121, Meyer, Conceptual Art, 64, 137. When commenting on an artwork from 1969, Dibbets said: “This work is one of a series involving the visualization of ecological systems” (quoted in Lippard, Six Years, 139). And more explicitly, Burgin: “The artist is apt to see himself not as a creator of new material forms but rather as a coordinator of existing forms.” “Situational Aesthetics,” in Meyer, Conceptual Art, 81.

46 Alain Kirili, “La théorie visuelle,” Opus International 22 (1971): 35.

47 The Art and Ideology exhibitions at the CAYC (1972) point in this direction: Grupo de los Trece [Group of Thirteen] and others; the Homage to Salvador Allende exhibition in September 1973, Video-alternativo, January 1974, Arte de sistemas de Latinoamérica, Amberes, April 1974. The alternative, in the words of Jorge Glusberg would be “to develop an art of liberation opposed to the art of domination”, taking advantage of the methods used in other cultural centres. Some of the most famous names in this regard include: L. Benedit, C. Ginzburg, L. Pazos, H, Zabala, J. C. Romero, O. Romberg, and E. A. Vigo. There is often a contradiction between the proposals put forward and practice itself in the Argentine group, which is easy enough to understand if we consider the difficulties of doing away with mimesis. Some artists, such as Juan Pablo Renzi, the creator of Tucumán arde (1968), make a more explicit political commitment in their work. Equipo de contra información continues the exercise of communicating political messages.

48 Elise Verón, Lenguaje y comunicación social (Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 1971), 139 ff.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simón Marchán Fiz

Translated from Spanish by Isabel Adey Originally published as “El arte de ‘concepto’ y los aspectos conceptuales” in Del arte objetual al arte de concepto (1960–1974): Epílogo sobre la sensibilidad “posmoderna”. Antología de escritos y manifiestos (Madrid: Alberto Corazón Editor, Comunicación Serie B, 1974), 299-329.