The Role of Conceptual & Text Artists in the emergence of the Contemporary: Weiner, Kruger, Kosuth, Holzer & Haacke (original) (raw)
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Caa.reviews, 2001
29 b/w ills. $50.00 (0-262-01173-5) This century's second great period of artistic invention lasted from around 1944 to around 1972 -from Abstract Expressionism, that is, to Conceptual Art. Artists since then have basically been involved in digesting the implications of that earlier period-a serious job of work that remains unfinished. Art historians have been at it too, at least as far as revisiting the '40s and '50s. Now
An Inadequate History of Conceptual Art
October, 2000
After a number of years of observing the resurgent interest in Conceptual art in Europe, the United States, and parts of Asia and Latin America, I was motivated to produce a project that would raise some questions about its return. This return has taken various forms: retrospectives, revived careers, academic and press attention, market interest, the coining of the term neo-conceptualism, and, more recently, books. The intended purpose of this project was to slow down the rapidity with which this return occurred, in order to be able to look more closely at its significance. I thought that if I asked artists to speak from memory about conceptual projects from the past, the recountings would include both valuable recollections and the fallacies of human memory. It seemed that these fallacies, the stutters of memory, so to speak, could trouble the fluidity of the official return. In 1998, I sent letters to sixty artists, asking them to participate in this project. Forty artists agreed to respond to the following statement: "Briefly describe a conceptual art work, not your own, of the period between 1965 and 1975, which you personally witnessed/experienced at the time. For the sake of this project, the definition of conceptual art would be broad enough to encompass such phenomena of that period as actions documented through drawings, photographs, film, and video; concepts executed in the form of drawings or photographs; objects where the end product is primarily a record of the precipitant concept, and performative activities which sought to question the conventions of dance and theater." * This project was first exhibited in September 1999 at American Fine Arts Gallery, New York, and in January 2000 at The Oliver Art Center, CCAC, Oakland. Another version was exhibited in the Whitney Biennial, 2000. Note that in order to capture some of the spoken quality of the recordings in text form, pauses in speech are indicated by ellipses. Although the installation format allows the spectator to distinguish between male and female voices, the printed version does not. Thanks to Makram El-Kadi, who assisted in the coordination of the project, and to all the artists for their generous contributions of time and thoughts.
Contemporary art: 1989 to the present
Choice Reviews Online, 2013
Inhabiting the technosphere. Art and technology beyond technical invention Prepublication Manuscript "Media convergence under digitality actually increases the centrality of the body as a framer of information: as media lose their material specificity, the body takes on a more prominent function as selective processor in the creation of images." 1 The body as a framer of information: This notion, presented in the introduction to Mark Hansen's 2004 New Philosophy of New Media, could also stand as an introduction to the general condition under which art after 1989 thinks, produces and engages with technology. It marks not just a shift in thinking that concerns our general understanding of media technologies and practices-but an equally significant shift taking place within the type of artistic practice where new media and information technologies are not just deployed but are themselves also objects of thinking, investigation and imagination. The 1 Timothy Lenoir, Foreword, in Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, MIT Press, 2004, xxii task for art history is then to try to understand the newly prominent mediatic body that emerges with this shift-to discover its various manifestations in artistic practice, as well as its implications for aesthetic theory. In particular, we need to conceptualize its double relation to, on the one hand, technological media and the realm of media production and, on the other hand the notion of the artistic medium. With this shift, several influential conceptions of the relation between art, technology and media may be questioned. Firstly, the notion of the body as a framer of information challenges some of the most influential theorizations of the cultural shift that took place in the 1990's, as the Internet became a global phenomenon and digital processing emerged as a communal platform for all previously separate media and technologies of expression. One was the marginalization of art in the realm of new media. Digital media leave aesthetics behind, Friedrich Kittler claimed, with all the apocalyptic gusto of the early computer age: In distinction to the consciousness-flow of film or audio tape, the algorithmic operations that underpin information processing happen at a level that has no immediate correlate to the human perceptual system. Humans had created a non-human realm that made obsolete any idea of art based on the sense apparatus. And this turn of events was related to the way in which technologies of the information age severed any tangible connection with human existence beyond what pertains to the control practices of capitalist superpowers, notably warfare, surveillance and superficial entertainment or visual "eyewash". 2 Yet, against Kittler's bleak description of posthuman technologies it could be argued that information will still necessarily have to be processed by human bodies-even if the interaction between the human perceptual
Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology
The MIT Press conceptual art conceptual art: a critical anthology edited by alexander alberro and blake stimson the MIT press • cambridge, massachusetts • london, england
From visual to textual : typography in/as conceptual art
2014
Text-Based Conceptual Art and Typographic Discourse I begin this discussion with a quote from Peter Osborne's book on Conceptual Art, where he notes how: At its best, "Conceptual Art was never quite sure where the work was:" because it was never just in one place, or even one kind of place… Making this apparent, in opposition to the monistic materialism of Greenberg's late modernist criticism, was the most critically productive use of written language in the art of the 1960s…However, this does not mean that the visual dimension of linguistic inscription is irrelevant, even when it is the function of such inscription to negate the intrinsic significance of visual form. On the contrary, it is precisely its "unmarked" or neutral visual quality that performs the negation. In… many [artworks] of the period, this was achieved via design decisions associated with "publishing," rather than with "art." 1 This quote is useful, not only because it introduces the emergence of text-based art works within this art historical period and situates them against the shifting critical discourse surrounding art at that time, but also because of the way in which it draws particular attention to typographic language and the activity of publishing as key factors in the ability of these works to, as Osborne puts it, "negate the intrinsic significance of visual form." Retrospective critical accounts of Conceptual Art are numerous and include comprehensive discussion of the motivations behind the adoption of published typographic formats as a means of producing and disseminating art. However, what has surprised me in my own consideration of the works is how these accounts are often supported by poor quality or misleading reproductions, or a failure to cross-reference examples to each other. What this becomes then is a general failure to adequately demonstrate the precise nature and evolution of these works, either by failing to provide a full picture of their operation within this activity of publishing or through not giving a clear impression of the various different typographic 1 Osborne refers here to Terry Atkinson's 1968 article, "Concerning the Article: 'The Dematerialisation of Art.'"
THE FUNCTION OF TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY ART
Likovne besede, Art Words 112, 2019
Contemporary artists, art theorists and contemporary art curators talk and write a lot. There is a positive correlation between the apparent banality of any particular piece of contemporary art and the amount of text that comes along 'explaining' the piece in question. The paper explores and explains the real function of text in contemporary art and explores the source of its function.