12. Conceptual Art

conceptual art today we're going to be talking about a movement called conceptual art that began in the same era with minimalism and land arts and continues really even to today conceptual art just the term should clue us in that the artists involved with conceptual are going to be more interested in the idea or the concept than the form or ideas of let's say beauty or the visual stimuli of an artwork but don't be fooled because all art that we've looked at has involved concept and conceptual art prioritizes the idea above the form the form of the artwork is a vehicle for the idea so in the past we might have seen artists who really prioritized the the beauty of the painting or making some kind of a shocking statement perhaps or a very aesthetic statement here these artists are first of all interested in communicating an idea and then finding the right body might say or form for that idea this is one of the heralded works of conceptualism coming from the very beginning from 1965 with Joseph Casa Casa it's one and three hammers and so as he exhibited this piece we had on the left the photograph of a hammer in the middle was a three-dimensional hammer just the kind you would use every day hanging in the center on the wall and then the third part on the left or sorry the right was the verbal description or text description of a hammer and so when we see conceptual art sometimes we first see work like this it can seem very dry and perhaps very strange if we've grown up with the idea of art being for most of us art has been paintings or photographs and so to see this might seem kind of a strange puzzle and it is in a way sort of a puzzle that does kind of tickle your brain in a different place than maybe traditional arts have I'm here he's comparing these three versions of a hammer and asking us which is the real hammer is any one of them more real than the other sometimes when we say real we mean three-dimensional but if we look back to someone like Plato the Greek philosopher he was say that the idea that exists in our mind is actually the most real or even he would have said the ideal and then that all three-dimensional versions everything that we have here in the world is sort of a bad Xerox of that idea so Kossuth is playing on this this concept of what is real what is ideal how do we communicate and thinking of visual art as a language is is one area that conceptual artists sometimes touch on thinking about how do we communicate with one another and noticing things like when we say that this thing is called a hammer that's true in English but in every other language it might be a very different word and so even the very nature of language which we tend to think of as defined in concrete is actually really arbitrary at base so kind of playfully considering that question of language another pretty witty artwork that would be a conceptual work is this one by John Baldessari I will not make any more boring art from 1971 and it's just that right the statement written over and over and over again he began with traditional trained training and made paintings and was actually coming about in the era that Abstract Expressionism was very big in the late 50s and 60s and so he kind of came about in that tradition but grew tired of his own work and so he began turning to new directions and this was one of his attempts at sort of burning off the old and trying to make a start in a new direction so kind of comical on Kawara gives us this piece July 8 1981 it is a painting on canvas and here too there's I guess you could say a very dry humor about conceptual art when we talked about Abstract Expressionism we noted that many of the artists were sort of trying to make this existential statement taking action in the moment you know being in the moment of their era but also in that moment of them in the studio leaving their mark on the canvas and here on Kawara gives us also a statement of timeliness but here in this very sort of sort of dry way kind of playing on that idea of well you went timely here it is this is the actual date at which I'm making this painting right now conceptual art of course has some roots in the past it doesn't just come out of nowhere you might have guessed that it has a link to someone like Marcel Duchamp or the Dada movement where we see the concept of the artist becoming more important than the form so when Duchamp brings these kinds of objects his ready-mades into the gallery it's the idea that he is an artist has selected from all the different forms in the world he has selected these and then by bringing them into the context of the gallery he's given us a new context of recontextualization in which to consider these pieces and they can take on different meanings by being in this new place right sometimes I give the example of recontextualization or how important context is to students by saying you know if I met any of you in a grocery store and came up to you and said you need to write so many papers for me and take a test you would of course think I was crazy but because we're meeting in the context of a university it seems totally appropriate and believable that you should write papers for me or take a test for me right so context definitely does matter a urinal in your bathroom stall is one thing a urinal in the gallery does become something different also roots for conceptual art in surrealism many of you are probably familiar with Dali as a surrealist artist but also another one named Rene Magritte a French artist who was involved in surrealism and he gives us a piece like this one on the left here in French it says this is not a pipe and the title of the image is actually called the betrayal of images so we have a sense that there's some betrayal some kind of a lie going on and then we have the image a fairly realistic portrayal of a pipe painted above the words this is not a pipe and so here Magritte is also questioning well but isn't this a pipe or is it a representation of a pipe or should we say it's a painting of a pipe which is more real the painting or our idea or the pipe that you hold in your hand or the written version of pipe here P IPE right and then years later in the 60s he did another version of it and here we have sort of a quote of himself with this is not a pipe in the on the easel with another version of a pipe up above and this gives us a sense of is this other pipe hovering here maybe the idea in all of our minds hovering above the portrayal of the pipe and then of course the idea that both of these are actually in the same painting the overall artwork so sort of this dream within a dream or language within language so there's a conceptual route in surrealism going back to the the 1920s kouzef again gives us one and three chairs same ideas one and three hammers I'm just bringing home this this contrast of photographic representations three-dimensional object and textual definition I'm sorry another good example and a route for conceptual art would be looking at post-painterly abstraction so this was a kind of a transitional time right after Abstract Expressionism and heading toward pop art and mineral ISM that we have someone like Robert Rauschenberg and this piece that we're looking at here looks like a blank piece of paper which is what it is it originally had a drawing by willem de kooning the famous abstract expressionist painter and Rauschenberg was kind of a young you might say young upstart in the art world in new york city and he actually went to de Kooning and asked him for a drawing that he could erase and Rauschenberg tells the story that de Kooning looked through folders and folders portfolios of drawings trying to find something that would be really difficult to erase him something that he'd used a variety of charcoal and pencil and oil pastel on that would be really tough to do and so Rauschenberg took that drawing and then over the next two or three weeks going through ten of different erasers erased de Kooning's work going back against that idea of abstract expressionism as this existential statement of action to erase de Kooning's action starts to question well if the point of abstract expressionism was to make such a statement if you erase it or if you destroy it does it invalidate that original statement or does that does that meaning still hang in the air somewhere or does it attach to the person who created it it was also a way for Rauschenberg to both sort of honor de Kooning and also say I've arrived you know to take down this this master artist who was very very well known and to say okay I'm going to replace his drawing with this kind of new open playing field right so another route for conceptual art not much to look at in terms of form right but that concept is what can be exciting baldesarra again gives us the cremation project again during that time when he was trying to kind of go in a new direction he actually burned many of his paintings from that he had made between 1953 and 1966 burned them and with the ashes made these little patties that look like you know something like a seedy looking cookie to something like a cow patty and he displayed them in this way and really was making fun of himself in his own efforts perhaps failed efforts but also trying again to kind of clean that slate and go in a different direction and then lastly with minimalism and this is really where the birth of conceptual art by that name came from Sala Witte began working alongside of many of the minimalist that we talked about Donald Jed and Dan Flavin with these very simplified rigid forms without much of the artist kind of fingerprint on them right you can't really tell who specifically made these and he worked in repetition which a lot of the minimalist liked to do in that three-dimensional format so these kind of simple cubes although they are actually pretty exciting as forms I think you see them in a gallery and you move around them you know three dimensionally all of the the linear components make different shapes as you move and you see through from from block to block if anyone's a fan of maybe architecture kind of engineering these types of works might really appeal to inform however they also have a conceptual route and you can see how he very methodically went from one form to another doing these different iterations of how many different ways can I build up this simple form into a complex form right excuse me and the wit is actually one of the first artists to put into words the idea of what conceptual art is and so he wrote very helpfully for us one article which he called sentences on conceptual art and another which was called paragraphs on conceptual art they're actually both very easy and kind of fun reads he does have a sense of humor but just to simplify here and take a few highlights one of the things he says nice and clearly for us he says conceptual art is to engage the mind rather than the eye or the emotions he doesn't want the physicality of the artwork to interrupt the idea and he encourages our just to find the best form for their idea so by not letting the physicality of the work interrupt the idea I think he's pointing out that many artists have gotten so involved with well how do I handle the paint or what do I do with the bronze you know casting how do I do these different physical aspects of the work that maybe they didn't build up the idea in and of itself well enough so kind of just really relaying sorry relying on it to be attractive without really thinking am I actually conveying something interesting here in the idea and then the second one find the best form for the idea so this is really important and something that a lot of postmodern artists today are doing is that rather than saying well I'm a painter I'm always going to make paintings or I'm a sculptor I'm always going to make sculptures here llywydd is saying whatever your idea is if it's better conveyed in paint then you should make a painting but if the idea comes better a sculpture or if it comes across better in performance art or better in installation then do what you need to do to convey that idea right so not being branded by your own discipline but by thinking of this idea needs to be made manifest in whatever specific material from sentences on conceptual art he tells us the artist will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion his willfulness may only be ego so he thinks that we should artists should have an idea and then follow that idea follow that plan no matter what that even the artist should submit their will to the plan and follow it through and not change directions thinking again that a Beck's is kind of the the main stay at this moment in time this is very different when the Abstract Expressionists are painting it's all about their individual will and their emotions at that moment and Salah wit is much more distance he's saying don't give in to ego stay on the course from idea to its completion he says number 10 ideas can be works of art all ideas not need not be made physical now that is a bombshell to say that as a part of art you can have an idea and not necessarily make anything is groundbreaking right just get your mind around that for a second so what would that mean what would artists exactly do they'd be much more like philosophers or possibly storytellers would you card catalog your ideas it's a very radical notion that the idea is the artwork whether or not it has a physical form later on he says the artist may not necessarily understand his own art his perception is neither better nor worse than that of others and that too is pretty radical that the artist is not the expert that they you know put these works together but that other people's understanding of the work or perceptions of the work might be just as as worthy or more so he says the process is mechanical and should not be tampered with it should run its course and banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution so if you paint the most incredible painting and yet it's a really bland idea it's still bland artwork he says you can't rescue it just by painting something beautiful and I know not everyone might agree with this some of us would just like something that hangs nicely in our house and that is a valid part of art but I think it is interesting to think of on the professional level of art the most kind of avant-garde or forward-thinking part of art to think that a lot of artists I believe think that we've got a world full of beautiful things we really need to be making things that communicate interesting ideas that can hopefully further the world or change the world 33 says it is difficult to bungle a good idea so you can't rescue a bad idea but if you've got a good idea it's kind of hard to wreck it that's good to know just a couple more ideas from his paragraphs in conceptual art from 67 he makes the stance of conceptual versus perceptual so conceptual is aimed at the mind whereas perceptual art is really aimed at visual aesthetics or visual stimuli and this can even be something that you might identify in yourself that maybe you lean more toward conceptual art you really like something to kind of trigger something new in your head regardless of what it might look like versus others if you might really feel like I really want something that stimulates my eye that is really exciting or beautiful or intriguing to look at he talks about the idea as a machine that makes the art so let the idea you know run its course follow that idea through kind of artists need to get out of the way of that idea so it's an interesting way of thinking of art the idea as a machine eliminate subjectivity arbitrary decisions and capriciousness and I think this is really important that emotionally dry is not the same as boring so he points out that we are conditioned by Expressionists and he might even throw in something someone like the room antics romanticists that we're conditioned to expect an emotional kick and I think that this has some validity here whether or not conceptual art becomes our our favorite or not it is interesting to think about our culture still today even though he's writing in the 60s we really do like the dramatic highs and lows we like you know the roller coaster and you know it's it's interesting to question can we get interested in something that is a little emotionally more stable maybe even emotionally dry that boring may not be the same as emotionally dry so interesting things to consider now from here solid wit ends up creating drawings like this this doesn't look like a drawing it looks like writing which is what it is he actually begins giving instructions for drawings and am part of a kind of fun and brilliance of this is that he will write down very specific ideas so here you have from the center of the square draw a line halfway toward the upper-right corner from the end of this line draw a line to the midpoint of the right side it's a very specific kind of mathematical directions sometimes even giving specific measurements and from these directions anyone can make a solid drawing right so you can own your own Sala whit whether you want to do it on paper or you want to paint it huge on the wall of your house you don't actually have to go find a gallery spend millions of dollars to buy a Sol LeWitt artwork you can download the instructions and draw yourself so a really kind of beautiful idea I mean in here literally pointing toward the idea or the concept is what the artist has created here but he's going to allow anyone in the world anywhere anytime to create their own version their own physical manifestation of his idea and so sometimes you'll go to a gallery or a museum and see these kinds of works these solid drawings done by following these instructions it's a beautiful way of sort of fighting against art as a commodity making it much more democratic I mean even free and actually I have to say at least in this case I still find this very formally citing I mean it's visually interesting to me at the same time as also being conceptual art it has that both both components the form and the concept together another conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner has said once you know about a work of mine you own it there's no way I can climb inside someone's head and remove it and here again two pointing at that kind of critique of art as commodity that he he and many other conceptual artists wanted to make things that people would look at be changed by and then in that sense really own the work you don't have to necessarily buy it because you've experienced it and been altered by it so something beautiful and generous about those just a few other landmark conceptual works especially from the original era so walter de maria we might recognize being related to minimalist Sandland artists and here's another work of his called earth room from 1977 where he actually filled a gallery with black soil so you can't actually enter into it you're not allowed to march through it you actually stand at this doorway and see this entire gallery space and you know the gallery system how it works it's supposed to be a crisp clean absolutely you know beautiful pure white space this contemplative space and here he's kind of in a way sort of mucked it up with filling it with dirt and it you know you can smell the dirt even actually when you go and see it today there's a room in New York that actually still holds this work you can actually feel sort of the moisture and the smell of the dirt even in the floor beneath it and so it really changes the whole environment of that building it's so kind of interesting playful in one sense but then on the other you can look at it as a minimalist sculpture I mean even though it is literally dirt it actually doesn't seem dirty do you know what I mean the way it fills this room and makes you more aware of the open space up above it so you have a sense of that positive and negative play going on and then of course the high value contrast is also very graphically or visually interesting another walter de maria piece broken kilometer from 1979 so here we have we see three rows in front of us but there's also two more rows to the left a total of five five rows each with a hundred polished brass rods each rod is two meters long and five centimeters in diameter and the whole weight of this piece is nearly 19 tons so it's a huge hefty piece and literally all of these a total of 500 polished brass rods if you laid them end to end would go the length of a kilometer right so it's another way of envisioning this length that maybe we take for granted I know here in the states we more often count in miles unless we're runners perhaps but thinking of this distance that you take for granted that you might throw off the top of your head oh it's a mile away or oh it's five kilometers away but actually seeing it laid out in this way within within one room within one visual field is a really interesting change of concept about how you think about that distance similarly he did a vertical earth kilometer and so this is the same kind of polished brass rod reportedly a full kilometer long and what they did was drill into the ground and insert the brass rod and then bury it up to within about two inches of its depth so when you go to see this piece all you see is what we're seeing now you you know see your own feet and then this tiny circle but we know an idea that it actually goes one kilometer deep now this piece I think is funny in several different ways one is that it's very monumental if you think about the brass rods here being placed in the ground you know that this is kind of this is a large-scale hefty work so it's monumental an idea but then actually in when you would visit it it would seem very minimal you know very small and easy to overlook and another playful thing about it is the the concept of do we trust him I mean that could be just you know five inches deep or it could be five feet deep how do we know that it's truly one full kilometer so how much do we trust the artist it would be a good question so something playful about this conceptual work not formula formally that provocative necessarily but in the idea of it very provocative a couple of core issues just to sum up with conceptual art of course all materials are possible whatever will best serve the idea whatever will be the best vehicle for the idea no materials may be required as Sala wit told us that all ideas need not be made physical in terms of skill and technique it can vary widely so some of these pieces might be quite easy to render or like we said not rendered at all not made physical at all but some of them are actually very difficult or very crafted very skilled work so it can it can vary quite widely the artist may or may not physically create the work themselves or at all and the artist is foremost responsible for the concept or the idea of the artwork in terms of expression and the artists intent its me their personal nor cultural at least in the traditional sense so they're not expressing let's say the religious or philosophical outlook of the culture and most of them are not very personally engaged with you know telling their own biography or their own life experiences so in a certain sense a bit removed it tends to be more art that is about art or art that is about language like with Joseph Casas one in three hammers or one in three chairs art that is focused on engaging the mind is the intent here visual and emotive engagement are secondary and conceptual art is still a part of the practice today so we can even look at this piece from the 90s by Damien Hirst called the impossibility of death in the mind of the living and here he had an actual shark embalmed and displayed in this glass case and you can see it from two different viewpoints here and in this piece again like the artist in terms of skill and technique he has not done this personally he has not caught the shark or involved it himself and he's not built even the case by himself and what he's done is come up with this idea that he thinks is very conceptually stimulating very interesting and dynamic and I think one of the interesting questions is you know why is it in an art museum why rather than at you know a zoological Center or you know some other Chaya logical Museum and but being in the art context we ask different questions we come to an art gallery or museum to have an aesthetic experience to consider things in a particular way and so when you walk in and you see this animal and you also consider the title the title often makes a big difference we know that the artist is thinking about how we conceptualize death so here of course the shark is one of the animals that were most afraid of right and that also sort of symbolizes death symbolizes fear and fear of mortality and so here we are coming face to face with maybe our greatest fear and its mouth is wide open at us and yet it is also suspended right so it's our greatest fear suspended which is somewhat how death is in our minds we know it is you know eminent we know we can't avoid it forever and yet while we're alive it is always sort of this abstract thing we can't really imagine that the world goes on without us one last conceptual piece just more recent coming from the 90s by Felix gonzalez-torres and this piece called perfect lovers is simply two clocks hung side by side that are registering the same time and I think this one is very very sweet it's just kind of a nice little poem in a sense about how instinct you could say we are with our most intimate of friends or lovers so challenges and critiques of conceptual art is conceptual art still a visual art that's a good question so what is the appropriate balance between concept and form when you when you no longer make an idea into a physical form does that that we're leaving the realm of visual arts and does that matter is it a problem secondly is conceptual art alienating or elitist so some of the ideas being communicated can be hard to reach that can be they can require you to know a lot about maybe art history perhaps or philosophy perhaps and so is that too elitist is that not open enough for everyone is it a conflict of interest so sometimes these artists are critiquing the art world but while simultaneously contributing to it is that ok so you know contree King that art is a commodity but at the same time they might be displaying their work in a gallery or museum so is that a conflict of interest and then of course lastly how do you sell an artwork that is not a single portable work such as a traditional painting or sculpture so how are conceptual artists making it in the world we'll talk about that later on okay here are some sources the art story does have some information for you if you've been enjoying that website Museum of Modern Art as well and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles also on PBS if you haven't checked out the art 21 video series please do it is such a fantastic resource they are short and very enjoyable videos I think each artist section tends to be about 10 to 15 minutes and they just they're beautifully produced a little short segment so there is an r21 video on john baldessari as well as another artist that we didn't see here named james turrell who does sort of more architectural large-scale works that you might enjoy actually James Turrell also has a piece out at the cheek wood sculpture trail so if you are interested in going to cheek with museum if you're here in Nashville and keep an eye out for James Terrell's piece along there sculpture trail it's beautiful that would be a beautiful way to see some art and maybe also write your paper all right guys

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Length: 30min 25sec (1825 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2013