Twenty-five years later, “Global Conceptualism” still seems like an exhausting enterprise, and whenever I think about it, I feel like taking a rest. Looking back, it’s obvious to me that we were only able to do it because it was a friendship project much more than a scholarly one. In 1999, three close friends—Jane Farver, Rachel Weiss, and I—decided to organize this exhibition at the Queens Museum based on our relationships and common beliefs. There must have been four hundred pieces in the exhibition. I don’t know if it would have been possible to go through the experience together having merely a professional connection. It was more demanding for Jane and Rachel, since I was the only amateur on the team and was allowed to be a slacker.
In retrospect, there are several things that stand out. One is how the project changed from inception to execution. The first idea had been to create a Latin American conceptualist show that would explore the borderline between art and politics. Somewhat faithful to the idea of erasing the separation between art and life, the initial intention was to present examples of both activities without any particular designation. The exhibition would have artworks indiscriminately mixed with documents, and monitors with interviews presented in formats similar to video art. It was the reality imposed by the art-financing world that ultimately moved the project toward so-called pure art and a more encompassing international perspective.
While writing about Korean art of the 1980s for a show at the Queens Museum, Jane had the insight that 1968 was a contemporary and flexible time paradigm for rupture. The Gwangju Uprising of 1980 was in some ways a Korean equivalent of what happened in Paris in 1968. Different countries had their “’68” at different moments, some like Japan and Latin America actually dating to way before. That gave us the model for “local clocks” and released us from a single universal history of art and hegemonic timekeeping. In turn, Peter Wollen’s analysis of the differences between Sol LeWitt’s and Joseph Kosuth’s visions for conceptual art led us to differentiate between conceptual art as a style and conceptualism as a strategy. Both these points helped us focus on the idea of decentering the history of art into many histories that responded to local events and crises.
As a result, we were able to organize the art-historical world into a federation of provinces and disregard the traditional schematic division of center and periphery as well as the colonially biased notion of originality and derivativeness. These departures led to Anglo North America and Latin America occupying the same square footage in the exhibition. Another consequence was the challenge to the US interpretation of “1965–75” as the historical period for conceptual art. Both the style and the time frame were inserted into a longer coherent process. The exhibition started with Situationism and other art produced during the 1950s and continued all the way into the 1980s (1989 was the Chinese “’68”). Instead of being the originator, US conceptual art appeared as one of many manifestations within a much longer and more profound development of the arts in the second half of the twentieth century.
We had megalomaniac hopes with all of this. The main one was to break with hegemonic orthodoxy and provide a model for sane curating that would inform all future international curatorial projects. Predictably, our points did not sit well in the US, generating chauvinist resentment even among the most liberal magazines and papers. We took it as a compliment.
Today other thoughts are still lingering. Even on first viewing the exhibition, we realized that it should have been at least twice as big. It was difficult to communicate the idea that the chosen works stood as generic examples for a broader group. We included artists who were under-recognized at the time but are now very visible. We should have spotted them then. Also, the use of the word “global” ended up being misleading. Some years later a respected art historian who had not seen the show lauded it because of its presumed attempt to bring the art of all regions under a single transnational umbrella. Ironically we had tried, instead, to reassert the importance of locality and fight the belief that art is one colonizing and unifying transnational language. The word “global” related to geography, not to a unified aesthetic imperative that might serve the art market.
The fetishist power of the market presented another insurmountable obstacle. Many pieces in the exhibition had originally been intended as ephemeral and disposable. We faced the conundrum of either respecting the intent of the artists or underlining the historical importance of the pieces. We chose the latter, knowing that while keeping documentation for the future, we were also adding to the monetary value of the items and defeating their purpose.
For me personally, the exhibition brought about realizations that were way beyond curatorial issues. One was the relation we have with time: within a temporal framework, as artists we make, and as consumers we contemplate. The general superficial and unexamined assumption is that time and its use are for everybody pretty much the same everywhere and that we, as individuals, own it.
Stano Filko, Project "Solar System" (Cosmos), 1968.
However, much of the art in “Global Conceptualism” came from areas under de facto authoritarian rule, making clear to me the reality that in a repressive state, the ownership of time is taken over by the government. Contemplation becomes secondary to communication. The constraints that accompany this shift in ownership force engagement with new issues. Two of these are the avoidance of the erosion of information and the efficiency of passing on messages. Much of the work was extremely direct, sometimes mere slogans, and easily and quickly absorbed. The attempt to reappropriate time becomes a subversive activity, and works happen or are placed in the interstices that are left open or overlooked by repressive control. Strategies, then, shift from contemplation to the use of context as a lever to amplify resonance and to act as a reference to expand meaning. Duration and continuity become casualties, and messages shift from what in literature would be a treatise or a novel to a telegram mode with the biggest echo chamber possible.
Learning from advertising, the emphasis in these works moves from delivering declarations to creating opinions. Conceptualist photographic work in particular moved beyond straight documentation and focused on the creation of opinion through the combination of images. Urgency and the creation of militancy, I believe, have marked conceptualist strategies on the periphery and have made them something very different from hegemonic conceptual art. Conceptual art was already and will remain an aesthetic period, like cubism or Dadaism. Conceptualist strategies, however, represent an attitude, and this makes me believe that they will keep their relevance for a long time.
Less studied, but intriguing to me, is the effect that the relation to time has on a middle-class activity like art, and how it affects the canonical culture it produces. It would be an interesting subject for a PhD thesis to see if the preciousness of time was a factor that helped reaffirm hegemonic art’s preoccupation with formalism and appearance over content during the twentieth century. It would seem that formalism enabled quick and easy scanning for consumption, accentuated taste as a false filter for quality, and reoriented contemplation toward the spectacle format that helped size take over complexity. These are all qualities that don’t exactly activate political militancy.
Other points emerged from “Global Conceptualism,” although we didn’t explicitly explore them at the time. I believe that conceptual art and conceptualism should both be credited with an important and irreversible break in how we approach art in general. Thanks to both approaches, works of art are perceived as solutions to proposed problems. Hedonistic reactions, largely focused on the packaging or the formal presentation of a piece, have become secondary, and we have moved closer to seeing the artist as a creator rather than a producer.
In traditional terms, when focusing on the production of art objects, one may doubt that the historical lifespan of a dictionary entry by Kosuth or Cildo Meireles’s Coke bottles will compare to that of a painting by Velazquez. The objects are dissimilar to the point of making any comparisons absurd. However, all of them are precise and inevitable solutions to problems set by the artist. Thus, the longevity of artworks is not based on how well they are manufactured or how they appeal to our taste, but on how interesting the problems are and what they unleash in our thinking. More importantly, conceptual works involve the viewer in a more active relation and, unexpectedly, people have to start thinking. This should have consequences that transcend art and therefore make the works much more interesting. There is a more general pedagogic quality to this kind of work that I would like to discuss here and that has nothing to do with simplistic didactic approaches (which is not to say that such approaches were absent from the exhibition).
For a long time, I was intrigued by the fact that tautology was one of the markers of conceptual and conceptualist approaches. I was attracted to tautology in my own work, without understanding exactly why, except for that I saw it as something like a jail that challenged me to break out of it. Looking back, I would say that tautology was a way of isolating the formulation of problems in an unadorned way: the problem was revealed through its repeated formulation and excluded everything else, including the viewer. By definition, therefore, tautology was a dead end. But its use managed to put problematization on the table and helped bring art back as a cognition tool.
Until conceptualist strategies became an accepted part of art, we had to take for granted that scientific and quantitative thinking was the only objective way to handle and give some non-obscurantist order to reality. After the conceptualist break, art had to be accepted as a higher order of thinking, one that encompasses not only the linearity of cause and effect, but also rigorous nonlogical thinking. The implications of this should have an impact on the whole of the educational system.
Amazingly, nearly three decades after “Global Conceptualism,” art is still marginalized and made synonymous with craft. Most education today is still based on the quantitative linear thinking that was reaffirmed during the nineteenth century. In his prologue to a republication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Ian Hacking comments that in grade school science is still taught based on Newton’s theories, while in college it is taught based on Einstein. This creates a rupture for those who pursue science in college and keeps those who don’t in the Newtonian paradigm. This division is also indicative of education’s broader failure to cultivate in students the ability to see and organize patterns and to make connections.
If we translate this educational divide into aesthetic terms, we may see an opposition between the pedagogies of realism and conceptualism. In realist art, ideally, there is direct correspondence: for each point out there, you create one precise equivalent on canvas. In realist pedagogy everything else translates into units as well. One adds points for pictures, but also numbers for arithmetic, letters for words, credits for education. Including the quantification of education, this facilitates the pricing of everything. The US introduced the concept of credits—the ultimate educational symbol of quantitative pedagogy—around 1910. Since 1999, thanks to the Bologna Process, the credit system slowly became adopted in the rest of the world. The big irony is that credits were not created to improve education but to secure the retirement rights of US teachers in a measurable way.
Today the education system still acts as if infinity is something that might be reached by counting. However, submerged in big data, we live in a new definition of infinity that may only be grasped with conceptual tools and that no longer organizes information by presence or absence or by right and wrong. Big data, organized by algorithms and filters in search engines, accommodates and absorbs errors rather than discarding them, and uses estimation and fuzziness to achieve more precision and predictive power than counting. In everyday life, infinity is now administered through patterns and connections. The question then is: Who controls this connecting system? We are not being taught how to investigate this; we only learn how to consume it. Maybe it is time for realist aesthetics to leave the classroom and let conceptualism take over. Although it took well over a decade to click, for me this is the biggest lesson I learned from the exhibition. If we achieve the shift to a conceptualist pedagogy, “Global Conceptualism” would prove itself to have been really useful. Maybe it’s time to have a “Global Conceptualism 2” or “Global Conceptualism Returns”—which somebody else may have the pleasure to work on. Either way, I think it’s time to think beyond art.