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Conceptual art
What's the idea?

by Josie Appleton

Every time the Turner Prize comes around, there is a debate about
whether conceptual art is real art.

Reports lament that art students spend their time discussing ideas
rather than learning how to paint. 2001's Turner Prize winner, The
Lights Going On and Off by Martin Creed, was greeted with disdainful
cries of 'anyone could do that!'. It is at this time of year that
friends and family offer suggestions for Turner Prize entries (my
brother's last one was too disgusting to bear thinking about).

But what is conceptual art - and what isn't 'proper' about it?

Conceptual art is concerned with ideas and meanings, rather than forms
and materials. Early conceptual artists of the late 1960s began to
stick word-plays on gallery walls and submit plans for events as pieces
of art. The making of the art object was seen as a perfunctory affair,
that could be assigned to assistants or abandoned entirely.

However, it is hard to see how art can ever be just an 'idea'; art only
really works when it is a visual experience of some kind. Of course,
this visual experience represents ideas, but not pure ideas as are
found in speech or writing.

In some cases, the conceptual art brief became an excuse for laziness.
Rather than develop a piece of art, some artists just seemed to stop at
the level of their initial insight. One crossword-style piece by the
American artist Bruce Nauman in Tate Modern, produced around the time
of the Vietnam War, presents the interlocking words, 'War' and 'Raw'.
The fact that 'war' read backwards is 'raw' is a somewhat interesting
insight - but is it really a work of art? Compared to explorations into
the rawness of war such as Picasso's Guernica, Nauman's work seems
embryonic. He stopped where the work should have begun.

Another Nauman work is a piece of paper with 'Make me think me' written
on it. According to Tate Modern's labelmeister, this 'raises a variety
of provocative meanings' - which, I suppose, is one way of putting it.
When Nauman develops his insights a bit more, this tends to result in
more effective pieces of art. One of his trademarks was to repeat verbs
over and over, phrase-book-style, the effect of which is to make
activity seem absurd. In one piece, he develops this idea: two actors
on TV monitors read phrases - 'I hate, you hate, this is hate' - out of
sync with each other, becoming progressively more agitated. The effect
is disturbing and thought-provoking - unlike 'Raw War' it is the sort
of thing that you might want to come back to.

In other cases, conceptual artists 'add' ideas to objects. Because it
is the idea that matters and not the form of the art object, then
almost any idea can be added to any object. The forerunner of this was
Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 entered a urinal into an art exhibition
under the title 'Fountain'. By giving the urinal a particular title and
submitting it as art, said Duchamp, he had 'created a new thought for
that object'.

What Duchamp did at least had the virtue of being original - up until
that point, the issue of how we define art had not been questioned in
such a dramatic way. Among those who followed him, however, this game
of naming art objects became a little tired. Rather than explore ways
of representing experiences or ideas, it became a matter of showing up
the arbitrariness of systems of naming: presenting a plastic cup and
calling it 'tree', for example.

When reduced to the 'idea', most modern British art becomes banal
Conceptual art refuses to be judged in conventional artistic terms, in
terms of the material art object. But nor can it be judged as a pure
idea, either. The result is that it occupies a kind of no-man's land,
where it is difficult to judge or hold it to account.

For example, the German artist Joseph Beuys gave some lectures in
Marxist economics, and called the blackboards on which he scribbled his
notes works of art (some of these are in the Tate Modern). Now, it is
unlikely that these blackboards contain any shattering insights into
Marxist economics - but because they are 'art', and so one-step removed
from the person who created them, they cannot be criticised in terms of
economic theory.

So there are major problems with conceptual art - with the approach of
emphasising ideas rather than art objects. But much of the criticism of
'conceptual art' today is levelled at works that are not really
conceptual art at all. The label of conceptual art is liberally bandied
around, and stuck on to any piece of modern art that somebody wants to
discredit. Most of the art in the Saatchi Gallery or the Turner Prize,
for example, couldn't really be described as conceptual. Some of the
pieces in the Turner Prize involve significant craftmanship, and most
aim to create a striking visual effect. They are less about wordplay or
definitions than about shocking or impressive images.

You might argue that the Turner Prize pieces are driven by shock-value,
the desire to get across a striking 'message' about the degraded state
of sex or death. You could say that the piece of art is merely a
vehicle for the shocking idea. But if the artists only wanted to shock,
then there would be a no-holds-barred rush to shove corpses and live
sex acts into the gallery. As it is, the Chapman brothers went to
substantial effort to create what appear to be plastic blow-up dolls
engaged in fellatio out of bronze - clearly the materials mattered, and
the visual effect mattered. It was not just about the message.

In fact, when reduced to the 'idea', most modern British art becomes
banal. This is a good sign. Mark Quinn's Self (now lying in the Saatchi
Gallery), which involved removing several pints of blood and freezing
it in a cast of his head, doesn't succeed on the level of the idea. The
idea is 'I am my blood', or something like that. As an idea, it's worse
than alternatives, such as 'I am my class' or 'I am my religion'. Self
is impressive as a work of art because of the audacity of Quinn's
chosen material - and because of the haunting effect of the finished
product, which seems to have the waxy quality of a death mask. Nauman's
'Raw War', by contrast, would lose little on being reduced to the idea.

There is little point in opposing the art in the Turner Prize with some
fixed idea of 'proper' art. The Stuckists, who demonstrate outside the
prize every year, show how this position easily slips into caricature.
Proper art is paint and canvas, they say - which ends up with a
ridiculous fetishisation of the medium. It is as if they attribute
paint with almost magic qualities, so that you only need take a few
brushstrokes in order for it to be real art. The conclusion must be
that, while every primary schoolchild produces art, Damien Hirst does
not (one Stuckist recently described his work as 'taxidermy').

In actual fact, painting is just one medium among many - arguably no
better or worse than video art, readymades or installations. At a
recent debate, the British artist David Cotterrell said that when he
moved from painting to other media, he applied the exactly the same
standards of self-discipline. It wasn't as if when he painted he was
serious, and when he began to use video and interventions he started
just messing around.

There are major problems with conceptual art, but modern British art
cannot stand accused on these grounds. Rather than demonstrating
outside Tate Britain calling for a return to painting, it would be far
better to head inside.

....
Some pieces manage to be quite clever and aesthetically interesting. If an artist can manage both of those, then I haven't much problem with it.

But often, with conceptual art, the viewer is left feeling stupid, which i think is a great shame. One shouldn't have to have a degree in art to be able to appreciate work. It should on some level communicate to the viewer, either an idea or an aesthetic. Much of conceptual art does neither. I have seen potato chips glued to a wall and passed off as art. it deserved wtf points.

Like any other thing, music, literature, theater, there is bad work. to me, art is about communication, and if you fail to do that with the viewer, you have not created good art.