E PULIE Post Conceptual Art Embracing the End AAANZ 2024 (original) (raw)

2024, AAANZ Annual Conference

To elaborate his argument concerning the ‘Formalesque’, Smith provides a list of those art historians whose work he considers having impacted art’s history and his own ideas. The result is an almost exclusively masculine account of the history of art; Smith does not credit any female art historians with influencing the discipline. Despite Smith’s frequently stated belief in the impossibility of defining a moment while inhabiting it, theorists have attempted to reign in the particularity, openness and diversity of the current moment to render it contained and, therefore, meaningful. Such attempts, found for example in texts by Terry Smith or Peter Osborne, are frequently confounded by a sense of current art as necessarily diverse and undefinable. An inability to define current art is thought to render a sense of ‘the end of art’, and the end of art history as a discipline. Rather than evade art history’s end, we can consider art’s development through the modern as, conversely, an embrace of this end. This paper traces a definition of current art considering this view through the lens of conceptual artist’s ideals as described by Lucy Lippard, in a sense of such art as ‘post conceptual’. Lending agency to artists, this account of contemporary art strives toward a speculative, potentially feminist definition of contemporary art, to allow for the openness, diversity and escape from the institution for which modern artists strove. Rather than view conceptual artists’ perceived inability to fully escape the museum as a failure, it will here be framed as a means by which to understand and ‘define’ that which is known as contemporary art.