"This is the first publication to explore the rich history of conceptual art in Britain during its most exciting and innovative period, from the mid 1960s to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. It examines how the early works of this period took the form of a challenge to art's traditional boundaries and how by the mid 1970s, focus had shifted away from issues of art and individual experience towards questions of politics and identity, using the languages of documentary, propaganda and advertising in the service of action."--Publisher description.
What is art? Must it be a unique, saleable luxury item? Can it be a concept that never takes material form? Or an idea for a work that can be repeated endlessly? Conceptual art favours an engagement with such questions. As the variety of illustrations in this book shows, it can take many forms: photographs, videos, posters, billboards, charts, plans and, especially, language itself. Tony Godfrey has written a clear, lively and informative account of this fascinating phenomenon. He traces the origins of Conceptual art to Marcel Duchamp and the anti-art gestures of Dada, and then establishes links to those artists who emerged in the 1960s and early 1970s, whose work forms the heart of this study: Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, Victor Burgin, Marcel Broodthaers and many others.
Well-known art historians from Europe and the Americas discuss the influence of conceptualism on art since the 1970s. Art After Conceptual Art tracks the various legacies of conceptualist practice over the past three decades. This collection of essays by art historians from Europe and the Americas introduces and develops the idea that conceptual art generated several different, and even contradictory, forms of art practice. Some of these contested commonplace assumptions of what art is; others served to buttress those assumptions. The bulk of the volume features newly written and highly innovative essays challenging standard interpretations of the legacy of conceptualism and discussing the influence of conceptualism's varied practices on art since the 1970s. The essays explore topics as diverse as the interrelationships between conceptualism and institutional critique, neoexpressionist painting and conceptualist paradigms, conceptual art's often-ignored complicity with design and commodity culture, the specific forms of identity politics taken up by the reception of conceptual art, and conceptualism's North/South and East/West dynamics. A few texts that continue to be crucial for critical debates within the fields of conceptual and postconceptual art practice, history, and theory have been reprinted in order to convey the vibrant and ongoing discussion on the status of art after conceptual art. Taken together, the essays will inspire an exploration of the relationship between postconceptualist practices and the beginnings of contemporary art. Distributed for the Generali Foundation, Vienna.
This book documents an evolving work of conceptual art about the mother-child relationship begun by Mary Kelly during the 70s and exhibited in the 70s & 80s as an installation, with photographs and analyses of the material evidence of her baby's transition from infancy to the beginnings of independence. It introduced an interrogation of subjectivity by using psychoanalytic theory and focusing on the construction of material femininity.
In this groundbreaking book, Charissa Terranova unearths a forgotten narrative of modernism, which charts the influence that biology, General Systems Theory and cybernetics had on art in the twentieth century. From kinetic and interactive art to early computer art and installations spanning an entire city, she shows that the digital image was a rich and expansive artistic medium of modernism. This book links the emergence of the digital image to the dispersion of biocentric aesthetic philosophies developed by Bauhaus pedagogue Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, from 1920s Berlin to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s. It uncovers seminal but overlooked references to biology, the organism, feedback loops, emotions and the Gestalt, along with an intricate genealogy of related thinkers across disciplines. Terranova interprets anew major art movements such as the Bauhaus, Op Art and Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), by referencing contemporary insights from architects, embryologists, electrical engineers and computer scientists, among others.This book reveals the complex connections between visual culture, science and technology that comprise the deep history of twentieth-century art.
Critical and theoretical essays by a long-time participant in the Art & Language movement. These essays by art historian and critic Charles Harrison are based on the premise that making art and talking about art are related enterprises. They are written from the point of view of Art & Language, the artistic movement based in England—and briefly in the United States—with which Harrison has been associated for thirty years. Harrison uses the work of Art & Language as a central case study to discuss developments in art from the 1950s through the 1980s. According to Harrison, the strongest motivation for writing about art is that it brings us closer to that which is other than ourselves. In seeing how a work is done, we learn about its achieved identity: we see, for example, that a drip on a Pollock is integral to its technical character, whereas a drip on a Mondrian would not be. Throughout the book, Harrison uses specific examples to address a range of questions about the history, theory, and making of modern art—questions about the conditions of its making and the nature of its public, about the problems and priorities of criticism, and about the relations between interpretation and judgment.
The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture collects thirty essays from a transdisciplinary array of experts on biology in art and architecture. The book presents a diversity of hybrid art-and-science thinking, revealing how science and culture are interwoven. The book situates bioart and bioarchitecture within an expanded field of biology in art, architecture, and design. It proposes an emergent field of biocreativity and outlines its historical and theoretical foundations from the perspective of artists, architects, designers, scientists, historians, and theoreticians. Includes over 150 black and white images.
By the early 1960s, theorists like Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, and Barthes had created a world ruled by signifying structures and pictured through the grids of language, information, and systems. Artists soon followed, turning to language and its related forms to devise a new, conceptual approach to art making. Examining the ways in which artists shared the structuralist devotion to systems of many sorts, Systems We Have Loved shows that even as structuralism encouraged the advent of conceptual art, it also raised intractable problems that artists were forced to confront. Considering such notable art figures as Mary Kelly, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, and Rosalind Krauss, Eve Meltzer argues that during this period the visual arts depicted and tested the far-reaching claims about subjectivity espoused by theorists. She offers a new way of framing two of the twentieth century’s most transformative movements—one artistic, one expansively theoretical—and she reveals their shared dream—or nightmare—of the world as a system of signs. By endorsing this view, Meltzer proposes, these artists drew attention to the fictions and limitations of this dream, even as they risked getting caught in the very systems they had adopted. The first book to describe art’s embrace of the world as an information system, Systems We Have Loved breathes new life into the study of conceptual art.
During the mid-1960s avant-garde artists in New York developed a multimedia art form devoted to ideas instead of objects. A history of the movement can be traced back to the minimal art and the earlier works of Marcel Duchamp, the black paintings of Ad Reinhardt and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. By 1965, such artists as Mel Bochner and Joseph Kosuth were turning away from conventional art and viewing art as a concept, based primarily upon language.
This book examines the use of image and text juxtapositions in conceptual art as a strategy for challenging several ideological and institutional demands placed on art. While conceptual art is generally identified by its use of language, this book makes clear exactly how language was used. In particular, it asks: How has the presence of language in a visual art context changed the ways art is talked about, theorised and produced? Image and Text in Conceptual Art demonstrates how artworks communicate in context and evaluates their critical potential. It discusses international case studies and draws resources from art history and theory, philosophy, discourse analysis, literary criticism and social semiotics. Engaging the critical and social dimensions of art, it proposes three methods of analysis that consider the work’s performative gesture, its logico-semantic relations and the rhetorical operations in the discursive creation of meaning. This book offers a comprehensive method of analysis that can be applied beyond conceptual art.
