Cited on a file card from the catalogue/exhibition by Gary Coward with Arthur Bardo and Bill Vazan, “45°30'N-73°36'W + Inventory ,” Williams Art Gallery, Montreal, 1971.
Simon Blackburn, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.) Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press, posted April 8, 2008.
Terry Smith, “Peripheries in Motion: Conceptualism and Conceptual Art in Australia and New Zealand,” in Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss, eds., Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), 87–95.
Ian Burn, “Conceptual Art as Art,” Art and Australia (September 1970): 167–70.
During the 1990s, Burn became acutely aware of what he saw as the growing disjunction between the histories of art written by art historians and what he saw as the historical work, on both art and history, being undertaken in certain works of art: “While any image or object can be fitted into many historical discourses, it cannot be at the expense of the historical discourse within the image itself.” (Ian Burn, “Is Art History Any Use to Artists?,” in Ian Burn, Dialogue: Writings in Art History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991), 6.) To Burn, artists created that discourse less as picturing of it (as if it were a parade occurring at a representable distance), more in the way they composed their works, in the disposition of elements internal to each work. Sidney Nolan and Fernand Léger were prominent examples: in one of his essays, Burn showed that Nolan used some compositional ideas of Léger’s not to create a local modernism, nor to modernize his own art by imitation, but to negotiate a reconception of what landscape might mean in Australian art and history. “Sidney Nolan: Landscape and Modern Life,” in Burn, Dialogue, 67–85.
Conversation, New York, March 27, 2011.
An observation made by Boris Groys in a seminar at the Courtauld Institute, University of London, March 9, 2011.
“Before the Warhol canvases we are trapped in ghastly embarrassment. This sense of arbitrary coloring, the nearly obliterated image and the persistently intrusive feeling. Somewhere in the image there is a proposition. It is unclear.” David Antin, “Warhol: The Silver Tenement,” Art News (Summer 1966): 58. Cited by Leo Steinberg, see Harrison & Wood , 953.
I first published these propositions, under the heading “A Theory of Conceptualism” in “Conceptual Art in Transit,” chapter 6 of Transformations in Australian Art, volume 2, The Twentieth Century—Modernism and Aboriginality (Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002), 127. They may be found in a nascent form, but applied to the Art & Language group only, in my essay “Art and Art & Language,” Artforum XII, no. 6 (February 1974): 49–52.
“Concept Art” is first of all an art of which the material is concepts, as the material of e.g. music is sound. Since concepts are closely bound up with language, concept art is the kind of art of which the material is language.” Henry Flynt, “Concept Art,” 1961, in La Monte Young ed., An Anthology (New York: George Maciunas and Jackson MacLow, 1962).
Morris is just one among many artists whose breakthrough work during the 1960s and 1970s has led to a practice that is at once innovative, reactive to the innovations of younger artists, and retrospective with respect to itself and the innovations of contemporaries past and present. This is a (remodernist) resonance within contemporary art that calls for careful analysis and cautious synopsis.
“For the artist… is concerned only with the way (1) in which art is capable of conceptual growth and (2) how his propositions are logically capable of following that growth.” Joseph Kosuth, “Art After Philosophy,” Studio International 178, nos. 915–17 (1969); in Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966–1990 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 20. It is interesting that his illustrations of such propositions include this: “If Pollock is important it is because he painted on loose canvas horizontally to the floor,” not because he hung them on the wall subsequently, and even less due to his notions of “self-expression.” Ibid., 21. University of Pittsburgh graduate student Robert Bailey remarks that Kosuth’s statement could also be taken to mean that after Duchamp drew attention to the conceptual core of consequential art, all art of consequence made at any time anywhere is ipso facto conceptual. This is an idea that unleashes a quest of reinterpretation of potentially immense proportions.
Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum V, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 79–83.
Sol LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” Art-Language 1, no. 1 (May 1969): 11–3. Five versions in manuscript are reproduced in Conceptual Art in the Netherlands and Belgium 1965–1975, ed. Suzanne Héman, Jurie Poot, and Hripsimé Visser (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers for the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), 48–83.
Among Canadian artists working in New York at the time, Michael Snow’s Authorization (1969) gets close to this, but the mirror makes it not tautological: it is at least partly about not being able to see one’s whole reflection, and is thus partly consonant with Warhol’s filmmaking. Nor should we forget the obvious fact that it is also a real metaphor for the process of being “authorized”—recorded by authority, as in having a passport photograph taken. Snow’s work Red to the Fifth is tautological: it is a demonstration piece that leaves nothing dangling—rare in Snow’s art, to my knowledge.
A similar set of instructions with slightly different wording is cited in Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973), 227.
See Terry Smith, “Art and Art & Language,” Artforum XII, no. 6 (February 1974): 49–52.
See Sandy Kirby, ed., Ian Burn, Art: Critical, Political (Nepean, Australia: University of Western Sydney, 1996).
See Bruce Barber, ed., Condé and Beveridge: Class Works (Halifax, Nova Scotia: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2008).
Boris Groys, “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism,” A-YA, no. 1 (1979): 1.
Boris Groys, History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), 35.
A-YA, no. 1 (1979): 1.
Matthew Jesse Jackson, The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 110.
Alla Rosenfeld, Moscow Conceptualism in Context (Munich: Prestel for the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, 2011).
Marek Bartelik, “The Banner Without a Slogan: Definitions and Sources of Moscow Conceptualism,” in Rosenfeld, Moscow Conceptualism in Context, 16.
Camnitzer, Farver, and Weiss, Global Conceptualism, vii.
Camnitzer, Farver, and Weiss, Global Conceptualism, viii.
The Museo del Barrio show could have done better in this regard, but the catalogue is comprehensive. See Hans-Michael Herzog and Katrin Steffen, Luis Camnitzer (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje-Cantz for Daros Museum, Zurich, 2010).
Camnitzer, Farver, and Weiss, Global Conceptualism, vii.
Margarita Tupitsyn, “About Early Soviet Conceptualism,” in Camnitzer, Farver, and Weiss, Global Conceptualism, 98–107.
Reiko Tomii, “Historicizing ‘Contemporary Art’: Some Discursive Practices in Gendai Bijutsu in Japan,” positions 12:3 (2004): 611–41.
Cited in Charles Harrison, Conceptual Art and Painting: Further Essays on Art & Language (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 27.
See Terry Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents (London: Laurence King; Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2011).
Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 1998). The most comprehensive compendium, unmatched in its coverage of Central and Eastern European work in particular but global in its reach, is Misko Suvakovic, Konceptualna Umetnost (Novi Sad, Serbia: Muzej Savremene Umetnosti Vojvodine, 2007).
These remarks combine elements from three recent lectures. The first was delivered on November 27, 2010, at the conference organized by Barbara Fischer, director of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, University of Toronto, in association with the exhibition “Traffic: Conceptualism in Canada,” shown at the University of Toronto Galleries during the preceding months. The second, dedicated to the memory of Charles Harrison, was delivered at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, on March 8, 2011, as part of a series on Global Conceptualism organized by Sarah Wilson and Boris Groys. The third was presented on April 14, 2011, as part of a conference titled “Revisiting Conceptual Art: The Russian Case in an International Context,” convened by Boris Groys and organized by the Stella Art Foundation, Moscow. I would like to thank all those concerned.