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Course of Study:
(ACI700) Introduction To Digital Photography

Title of work:
Conceptual art (2002)

Section:
Approaching conceptual art pp. 6--15

Author/editor of work:
Wood, Paul.; Tate Gallery.

Author of section:
P Wood

Name of Publisher:
Tate Publishing
 READING
Source: Wood, P 2002, 'Approaching conceptual art'
Conceptual art, Tate Gallery, London, pp. 6-15.
 I

APPROACHING CONCEPTUAL ART

As befits an art of the mind, 'Conceptual art' poses problems right from the
start. \Vhat was it? When was it? (Is it still around or is it 'history'?) Where was
it? Who ni.ade it? ( Are we to consider 'X' a Conceptual artist or not?) And of
course, the umbrella-question: why? \Vhy produce a form of visual art
prernised on undercutting the two principal characteristics of art as it has come
down to us in Western culture, namely the production of objects to look at,
and the act of contemplative looking itself (fig.r)?
This is not just a rhetorical device with which to open a book on the subject.
These are real questions. It is not at all clear where the boundaries of
'Conceptual art' are to be drawn, which artists and which works to include.
Looked at in one way, Conceptual art gets to be like Lewis Carroll's Cheshire
cat, dissolving away until nothing is left but a grin: a handful of works rnade
over a few short years by a small number of artists, the n10st important of
whom soon went on to do other things. Then again, regarded under a different
aspect, Conceptual art can seem like nothing less than the hinge around which
the past turned into the present: the n1odernist past of painting as the fine art,
the canon from Cezanne to Rothko, versus the postmodernist present where
contemporary exhibition spaces are full of anything and everything, from
sharks to photographs, piles of rubbish to multi-screen videos - full, it seems,
of everything except modernist painting.
Moreover, Conceptual art's legacy is exceptionally argumentative. Most of
the major players are still living, and matters of status and priority are jealously
guarded. In the mid-r99os, members and ex-members of the English group Art
& Language conducted a war of words in print about the history of their

6
activities in the mid-197os. In the 1989 catalogue to L'art conceptuel at the Centre
Pornpidou in Paris, the first major exhibition to survey Conceptual art as a
historical phenorn.enon, the artist Joseph Kosuth accused the historian
Benjamin Buchloh of partisanship and bias after Buchloh had accused him of
falsifying his role in the movement's origins. And this is not a new
phenomenon. As early as 1973, the American artist Mel Bochner greeted the-
critic Lucy Lippard's attempt to catalogue developments in Conceptual art
from r966 to 1972 in her book Six Years, with a root and branch condemnation
in the pages of Ariforum, the leading art magazine of the period. For Bochner,
Lippard's account was 'confusing' and 'arbitrary', an 'act of bad faith' that
resulted in little more than a 'parody' of what actually happened. Much later, in
the 1990s, when 'historical' Conceptual art began to be curated on a major
scale, Lippard herself set her sights on those who now queued up to explain its
importance, writing that she trusted neither the n1.emories of those who were
there, nor the supposedly authoritative overviews of historians who weren't.
ln addition to such disputes, the historical accounts of Conceptual art that
have emerged scarcely offer a consensus. Lippard's retrospect chronicled a set of
efforts, not least by women and Latin American artists, to break free of the
bureaucratic and confining protocols of modernism, itself held to be largely
client to the wider structures of American power. The critic and historian
Charles Harrison regards Conceptual art, particularly the work of the Art &
Language group, not as a break with modernist principles in the n:m1e of a re-
engagement with social modernity, but as a necessary re-formulation of the
grounds of art's critical independence. For him, an engagement with social
modernity and aesthetic independence are anything but antithetical. For his
part, Benjarn.in Buchloh judged the work of at least some- of Conceptual art's
leading practitioners to be nothing less than 'an aesthetic of administration',
that is, as mirroring the structures of Western capitalism in its manageriat
post-industrial phase; for Buchloh, the only defensible 'conceptualist' practice
was a critique of cultural institutions. In the face of such contrasting views it
would be na1·ve to assume that the present book has located the Archimedean
point from which a fully finished account of Conceptual art may be levered
into the edifice of art history.

NAMES
Even the name presents something of a problem. I have already used the phrase
'Conceptual art' to refer to a historical form of ;J.Vant-garde practice that
flourished in the late 1960s and 1970s. The term had historical currency, being
used at the time to refer to a variety of language-, photography- and process-
based a(rivities: a kind of fall-out from the coliision of Minimal art and
various 'anti-formal' practices on the one hand with the institution of
Modernism on the other, in a climate of increasing cultural and political
radicalism. The American artist Sol Le Witt published his 'Paragraphs on
Conceptual Art' in 1967 and subsequently his 'Sentences on Conceptual Art' in
1969. Also in 1969, the first issue of the periodical Art-Language featured on its
cover the sub-heading, 'The Journal of Conceptual Art'. But the phrase
'Concept art' turns out to have been first employed by the writer and musician

7
 Henry Flynt as early as 1961 in the context of activities associated with the
Fluxus group in New York. In an essay subsequently published in the Fluxus
Anthology ( 1963), Flynt wrote that "'Concept Art" is first of all an art of which
the material is "concepts"', going on to make the point that, 'since "concepts"
are closely bound up with language, concept art is a kind of art of which the
material is language'. Yet, as central a figure as Lucy Lippard has commented
flatly that Flynt's Fluxus-inspired sense of 'Concept Art' had little to do with
what she understood as the key activities of the Conceptual art vanguard in
New York in the mid- to late-196os: 'few of the artists with whom I was

1
Joseph Kosuth
mean-ing (men'iIJ), n. 1. what is meant; what is in- Titled (Art as Idea as
tended to be, or in fact is, signified, indicated, referred Idea) [Meaning} 1967
to, or understood: signification, purport, import, sense, Photostat on paper
or significance: as, the meaning of a word. 2. [Archaic], mounted on wood
119.4 X 119.4
intention; purpose. adj. 1. that has meaning; signifi- (47x47)
cant; expressi,~e. The Menil Collection,
Houston

involved knew about it, and in any case it was a different kind of "concept'".
The point here is not that a discussion of antecedents should be excluded from
a study of Conceptual art, but that, in writing histories of art, we have to be
wary of making plausible-sounding art historical connections that may have
had less impact on the actual making of art at the time than retrospective
genealogists would like.
It is with such issues in n1ind chat we have to be aware of a third term that
has come into increasing currency. The term is 'conceptualism', and it has more
than one inflection. On the one hand, there is a use of this word favoured by

8
journalism.. To take an example more or less at random, in the run-up to the
.woo Turner Prize competition at Tate Britain in London, one of tlw English
broadsheet (not tabloid) newspapers casually aimed a jibe at 'the dead
animal/unmade bed conceptualisrn_' of contemporary art. 'Conceptualism',
that is, has com.e to stand in some quarters for the array of contemporary
practices that do not conform to conventional cxpect;Hions of art exhibitions
showing hand-crafted objects for aesthetic contemplation. In this sense,
'Conceptualisrn' becomes a negative catch-all fi)l· what conservatives of various
stripes do not like about contemporary art.
There also exists however, a diametrically opposed sense of the tc-rm. Jt has
become a commonplace of the politically correct that modernism was the art
of the \Vest, in particular of North America and Westrrn Europe, and an art of
men from those places, to boot. Insofar as Conceptual art appears ro stand at a
transitional point between high modernism and what followed, there have been
attempts to broaden the range of 'Conceptual art' out beyond the Anglo-
American centre-ground where it was mainly established during the
approximate decade 1965-75. A recent collection of essays, tided Rewriting
ConceptiwlArt has it that such art constitutes the ground 'on which nearly all
contemporary art exists', and that in its recent efflorescence, 'Conccptualism
has become all-pervasive if not dominant in the art world'. From that
perspective,' conceptualism' takes on a double identity. '.A.nalytical' Conceptual
art gets dmrngraded as the art of white male rationalists, mired in the very
modernism they sought to criti(1ue. The expanded history, on the other hand,
begins to excavate a huge :11-ray of artists, n1en and i,vomen alike, deemed to have
been working in a' conceptualist' manner from the 1950s onwards, on a range of
cn1.ancipatory themes ranging from imperialism to personal identity in far-
flung places from Latin America to Japan, from Aboriginal Australia to Russia.
The result is a claim for 'Global conceptualism', the title of a 1najor exhibition
in New York in 1999.
One of the t;i.sks of the present introduction ro Conceptual art, then, is to
hold apart these rival senses of the central term: neither embracing as
unproblematic the full-scale 'conceptualist' hypothesis, nor restricting attention
to an Anglo-American (and now historical) Conceptual 'canon'; neither
regarding Conceptual art as engaged postmodernism avant la lettre, nor as a
fading, bureaucratic echo of modernism. \Ve will pay most attention to various
tendencies that were significant in the crucial decade from the mid-196os to the
n1id-197os. But before that~ need to look at where Conceptual art came from,
its 'pre-history', so to speak. And finally we need briefly to consider the
question of its legacy for contemporary art: the question of whether Conceptual
art did indeed pave the way for an internationally successful 'conceptualism'.

9
 2

2
Kazimir Malevich
Black Square 1915
PRECONDITIONS AND PERSPECTIVES Oil on canvas
80 X 80 (31½ X 31½)
The relationship between Conceptual art and modernisrn is a fraught issue. Tretyakov Gallery,
What we can say with some certainty is that n1odernism in the don1inant form Moscow
it had come to take- in the Anglo-American world at least, that is to say as
theorised by the critic Clement Greenberg and frequently dignified with a
c1pital 'M', went into deep, arguably terminal, crisis in the late 1960s. This ,vas a
spectacular fall. But it was not the first. The 1nodern moven1ent underwent an
earlier crisis, fron, which it recovered, and from which modernism in the so-
called 'Greenbergian' sense emerged to become dominant. We need to establish
a view of this M/ modernism, the better to comprehend Conceptual art's
challenge to it. In doing so, we also need to encounter early modernism's' other':
the historical avant-garde ( a distinction I owe to the German historian Peter
Btirger).

FORM
Early modernism was transcultural and transhistorical in its sweep. The
Bloon1sbury critics Clive Bell and Roger Fry famously isolated the essential
feature of art as 'form': 'significant form' for Bell, 'expressive form' for Fry. For
Bell and Fry and others, modern art as it had been established by Cezanne held
out the promise of escaping fiom the weight of academic tradition through this
emphasis on pictorial form. This, it was clai1ned, could affect the emotions of
the sensitive spectator in a way comparable to the effects of sound in music; that
is, independently of what the forms may h:1ppen to depict. It is easy to see how
this kind of thinking coincided with practical moves towards a fully abstract

10
art; an art 'purified' of narrative or descriptive features, and acting on the
spectator like a 'visual music'. The work that, in retrospect, seems to have declared
open the world of abstract art, like a kind of visual manifesto, was Kasimir
Malevich's Black Square, exhibited in Petrograd in December 1915 (fig.2). Both
Malevich and Mondrian had seized on the opening made by Cubism and, from
first encounters with it around 19II/i2 until about 1914/i5, had begun to abstract
away recognisable features of the world from their paintings. But this process
of visual analysis only went so far, resulting in an art 'abstracted' from reality,
but still rooted in genres such as landscape, portraiture and still life. What it
does seem to have done, however, was to establish the possibility of a fully abstract
art, shorn of reference to an observable outside world. What followed, for both
artists, can only be described as an imaginative leap to the possibility, not of
breaking down a picture from an image of the world, but of building up a
painting from an entirely abstract set
of components. Regarded in this way,
the Black Square stands as something
like the first word in a new language,
which can then be developed,
elaborated and explored. Abstraction
spoke of a search for pictorial
essence, and a concomitant freedom
from traditional constraints on art.
This freedom, however, carried
with it certain dangers, dangers that
have haunted abstract art
throughout its existence. Who has
the authority to say whether a
particular configuration of shapes
and colours constitutes a 'forn1al
harmony', an 'aesthetic totality' - or
whether it fails to do so? In practice
this came down to the word of the
artist, or more pointedly, the art
critic. A system dependent on
critical authority is also clearly a system ripe for lampoon. Hence the early
avant-gardist joke of cricking a critic into waxing lyrical over an abstract
'painting' actually made by a brush tied to a donkey's tail. It is this kind of
problem chat Marcel Duchamp acutely highlighted, simultaneously with the
emergence of abstraction icsel£ The works in question have since been widely
canvassed as the predecessors of Conceptual art: the 'readymades'.

CONTEXT
As early as 1913, Duchamp began to take objects that had not originally been
made as art objects, but as ordinary, utilitarian things, and to transplant them
from their normal context of use into an alien context: an art context. The
problem was that, once Pablo Picasso, Vladimir Tatlin or whoever had made an
object of metal, cardboard, or wire and wood, potentially difficult problems

11
 arose about its identity. There was no precedent for such a thing being regarded
as a work of art. With benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see here how a crucial
slippage can occur between establishing the identity of something as a work of
art according to its possession of an
essential formal quality, and the very
opposite of that: treating it as art
not because of its ineluctably right
formal 'essence' to which we all
assent, but because of contingent
contextual factors, such as being
displayed in an art exhibition or
produced by someone upon whom.
the identity 'artist' has already been
3
conferred. Duchamp's first Marcel Duchamp
'Unassisted Readymade' was a metal Bottlerack 1914,
botderack ( fig.3 ). Despite his claim replica 1964

that the selection was arbitrary, one Metal

Edition of eight replicas
cannot but assume he chose each 64 .2 (25¼) high
something just close enough to the Marcel Duchamp
Archives/ Arturo
kinds of things that were beginning Schwarz Editions, Milan
to emerge as sculptural
constructions, to really force the
4
issue of what was and wasn't art, of Marcel Duchamp
where the realm of the aesthetic Fountain 1917,
ended and where utility began. replica 1964
Porcelain
The real cause celebre cam.e a few
38 X 48 X 61
years later with Duchamp's Fountain (15x19x24)
(fig.4). The story is well known. Tate

Duchamp, with his identity as a

vanguard artist well establi?hed, was 5
Jean-Leon Gerome
on the selection committee for an
0 Pti Cien 1902
open sculpture exhibition in New
Oil on ca nvas
York. He bought a urinal from a 87 X 66 (341/, X 26)
plumber's shop and submitted it as a Private collection

sculpture, crudely signed with the

pseudonym 'R. Mutt'. The work was
rejected by the jury- despite the
supposed openness of the exhibition
to anyone who had paid their fee -
and was not exhibited. Ducham.p
proceeded to run rings round the
judges' published reasons for
excluding the urinal: that it was somehow 'immoral', that it was 'merely'
plumbing, and so on. The point was made even more seriously funny by the
actually very close formal resemblance between the urinal and Constantin
Branc:usi's organically shaped abstract sculptures, some of which had already
been. exhibited in the United States.

12
LANGUAGE
Duchamp made his points with a botderack, a snow shovel and a urinal, but h e
also used language as a critique of art. The relation of language to modern art
is curious. At one level, modernism had purged art of language. Academic art
had been highly theorised, and was centred on the proximity of art and
literature, on the recounting in visual terms of predominantly classical and
biblical narratives. Modernism severs this connection. Notions of the 'innocent
eye' or, as later modernist critics wrote, of an art that appeals 'to eyesight alone'
add up to a domain from which language, with its connotations of the rational
and the conventional, is expunged. In its stead, feeling and emotion are
prioritised. But in another sense, modernism is haunted by language. Kasimir
Malevich, Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky all wrote copiously on the
theory of abstraction. In
Cubism, words frequently
appear in the paintings and
collages themselves. In general,
it i as if the relationship of
language to modern art is that
of a kind of frame, setting the
terms of the emotional
encounter of spectato r and
work of art. The spectator is, so
to speak, positioned by theory
before being freed to feel. Part
of modernism's revolution had
been to turn art away from a
public realm of shared language
and narrative, towards a private
sphere of feeling and emotion,
wherein these latter are
conceived as somehow more
fundamental than words, more
natural, more 'universal'. One of
Duchamp's strategies was to
infect the world of ineffable feeling with a series of more or less clever ( or
dreadful) puns. Thus the 'LHOOQ' ( which if read out loud sounds like elle
a chaud au cul: 'she's got a hot a~s') captioning the once-chaste and now
mustachio'd Mona Lisa; and the name he coined for his own female alter ego,
Rrose Selavy (eros) /est la vie: 'eros, that's life'). These all disturb the sonorities of
the canon and of the artistic author with the barbs of sex and slang. One of the
pomposities of early modernis~ was the assumption by artists of the
Romantically inspired role of visionary seer or holy fool. With his sexual
innuendo as well as his contamination of what Kandinsky called 'the spiritual
in art' through a range of ordinary commodities, Duchamp forces together
what the high priests would separate. The punning shop-sign constructed in his
old age by the arch-Academic painter Jean-Leon Gerome was doubtless not
conceived by him as 'art' at all (fig.5). In Duchamp's work, puns and jokes raised

13
 serious questions about where the boundaries of art lay.
Other avant-gardists continued to play the critical game, as modern art
became sufficiently established and sufficiently (self-) important to warrant its
own running commentary from within the ranks . Thus the Dadaist Francis
Picabia played with the notion of language and visual art as distinct but related
representational systen1s when he produced a painting made up almost entirely
of signatures (:6g.6). Later, the Surrealist Rene Magritte made a far-reaching
point about visual and verbal representation, about representation and reality,
with his painting of a pipe captioned Ced n'est pas un pipe ('This is not a pipe').
Sin1ilarly, in his painting of a hand-mirror there appears, instead of the
reB.ection of a human body, the
equivalent linguistic phrase corps
humain (:6g.7 ). Along with the
Dadaists and Surrealists, albeit in a
different vein, the Soviet
Constructivists drove through a
critique of the aesthetically
autonomous work of art and the
form of life that underwrote it.
With their notion of Art-into-
Production, they abjured art as a
symptom of bourgeois society that
had to be replaced by practical
contributions to the construction of
socialism.. This critique of bourgeois
individualism animated the avant-
garde in East and West alike, despite
the different circumstances in which
Dadaists, Surrealists and
Constructivists found them.selves.

HISTORY
In the early decades of the twentieth
century then, modernism had
become established with the
achievern.ent of an autonomous,
fully abstract art, but behind the
apparent authority and self-sufficiency lurked a conceptual instability, which
the critical avant-gardes i.nm1.ediately highlighted. Many of the recurrent
themes of the early avant-garde, such as the identity of the work of art, the
relationship of art and language, the relationship of art to a world of
commodity production set against an ideology of indepe11.dence and spiritual
value, and what it was that the artist did, can all be seen to prefigure later
Conceptual art. What is perhaps most surprising is the rapidity with which the
options were followed through. By the First World War, with abstract art on the
one hand and the readymade on the other, the conceptual limits of both
essentialism and contextualism had already been sketched. A few years later,
after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Constructivists were rejecting art as such.

14
 Modernism was, so to speak, both established and tested to destruction at the
same historical moment.
A double question prompts itself, then. At one level it is a silly question,
im.possible to answer. But also, given what we have just seen, it is an intriguing
one. First, how did modernism survive? Second, why did Conceptual ar t take so
long? If the poles of modernism and avant-gardism were established so early,
why doesn't a fully fledged Conceptual art arise around r918, or in the r92os,
instead of around r968 and in the r97os?The answer involves a recognition that
art is not merely an independent system of signification. It is in fact a social
practice, and the range of possible meanings available to art at any one time are
circumscribed by its historical situation. As it turned out, the political crisis of
the early twentieth century did not issue in a new world order. International
socialism did not happen. The
capitalist system inherited from the
nineteenth century that fell apart in
6
r914 was restabilised in the 1920s,
Francis Picabia only to go into prolonged crisis
L'oeil cacodylate 1921 again in 1929: a crisis that was not
Oil on canvas and resolved until 1945. But after the
collage
148.6 X 117.4 rupture of c.1914-21, the status quo
(58½x 46 ¼) did succeed in getting the lid back
Musee National d'art
Moderne - Centre
on. Throughout this period, the
Georges Pompidou , practice of modern art eem.s co
Paris h ave been triangulated by the
options of modernism., avant-
7 gardism and Social R ealism,
Rene Magritte
sometimes in their pure forms,
The Magic Mirror 1929
occasionally somewhat hybridised.
Oil on ca nvas
73 X 55 (28 X 21%) The debate, moreover, was bei ng
The Scottish National conducted in a shrinking space as
Gallery of Modern Art,
Ed inburgh the 1930s advanced - unoccupied
Europe ( principally Paris, co a lesser
extent London) and the United
Scates ( principally New York) - as
Berlin and Moscow became very
hostile places indeed for the practice of modern art. We may answer our
question Like chis: at chat juncture, modernism retained an emancipatory
potential. Against a backdrop of Fascism. and dictatorship, an independent art
has a critical edge in and of itself Autonomous modernism had its 'others',
virtually from. its inception, in the shape of the critical avant-gardes o f Dada,
Surrealism and Constructivism. But on the whole, modernism remained
hegemonic, while the avant-gardes were either subordinated or extinguished. It
is as if in order to be logically superseded, to have what Michael Fried called its
'primordial condition' (namely, that art is made to be looked at) challenged,
modernism had first to have used up all its potential. D espite the readymade
and productivisrn., it had not yet done so.

15